


In the Wind

by picnokinesis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen, I fully intended to post this all in one chapter, I have zero control I’m just here to transcribe, I hold no responsibility for everything the doctor does in this fic, Injury, Introspection, I’m honestly not sure how to describe this fic, Loss, Ponchos, Temporal Weirdness, The One With The Poncho, Thirteen Thinks A Lot, Time War feelings, Trauma, and so it got rather out of hand, because the whole point of this fic, but I’m a sucker for angst, but then three separate people were like ‘taka no’, memories and lack thereof, other characters are there but also not really, post-s12 e4 Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, pre-s12 e5 Fugitive of the Judoon, so many ponchos, solo fic (mostly), the all-consuming feeling of loneliness, the doctor wears a poncho what else do you need to know?, the homes we make for ourselves, the other title of this fic is, this was supposed to be a short oneshot, trigger warning: sand, unless they are?, was to put thirteen in a poncho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:09:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23918071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picnokinesis/pseuds/picnokinesis
Summary: The Doctor leaves her companions in Sheffield to go off on her own – only to crash on a desert planet in a remote part of space, concussed, her TARDIS broken and no way to get home.
Comments: 91
Kudos: 80





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wreckageofstars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckageofstars/gifts).



> [EDIT - if anyone is intimidated by the chapter length, let me know! I've got a google drive with the chapters split into 18 smaller chunks]
> 
> HEY EVERYONE
> 
> First off, a HUGE BIG THANK YOU to everyone in the doctor who discord server - I absolutely could not have done this without you guys, I love you all so much. 
> 
> Second - massive shout out to my sister @theplatinthehat (also my beta) who is straight up incredible for putting up with all this nonsense and also staged an intervention to make the ending actually be good. I am eternally grateful.
> 
> This is a finished fic, so chapters 2 and 3 will definitely be coming at some point! I hope y'all enjoy the shenanigans
> 
> (The title comes from the song In the Wind by Lord Huron)

The first thing that comes back to her is the sound of wind blowing outside.

It stirs something deep in her chest – an aching familiarity that she can’t quite name. It’s been a long time since she heard wind like that, and yet maybe not so long at the same time. She’d been small once and very, very afraid, clutching at rough blankets in the dark as the wind whistled, rattling against the wooden slats of the walls. The sand had always settled in heaps against the barn, and she’d have to pull the door inwards to get out. Sometimes, she hadn’t wanted to – had wanted to stay there, under the relative safety of the blankets. Back then, it had been something of a comfort. To be alone.

And then she’d gone back to that barn – once to ravage, to burn; twice more to save, to overwrite what had come before. And then, once again, to draw a line in the sand and dare the warmongers to come for her.

Each time, the wind had been there. Her silent witness. The howling in the dark. The precursor of the storm, forever oncoming, erasing the footprints left in her wake.

For a long, long time, she listens. She remembers. She wonders, distantly, if she is that boy in the barn again.

Then she registers the feeling of the TARDIS floor, hard and unforgiving under her back.

A breath catches in her throat, even as her eyes stay closed.

There’s something wrong.

No hum of engines. No brushing of telepathic circuits against her mind. Just…silence.

Nothingness, except the wind.

Her head _aches_ , the pain looming at the edges of her awareness _._

There’s something wrong. There’s something _wrong._ Why –?

Why does everything feel so _heavy?_

She makes the first attempt to open her eyes, but can only manage a squint. The TARDIS console room is dim, the crystal pillars dark and lifeless, but there’s natural light coming from somewhere and the photons are stabbing at her retinas. They’re really going for it, funky little light particles. She grimaces, vaguely wondering if this is vengeance for something she’s done. Or maybe something she’s going to do. It probably is. If anyone could find a way to personally offend light as a concept, it’s her.

She probably deserves it, whatever she’s done. Still hurts a lot though.

She _...possibly_ has a concussion.

With a weary groan, she tries to push herself up – only _that’s_ a mistake, because immediately her body _screams_ in protest, apparently battered and bruised all over, and maybe worse besides. She decides that it doesn’t matter and makes herself sit up anyway. She’ll heal, and she can take the pain – right now there are other priorities. Like _where is she_ and _what happened_ and –

And why does the TARDIS feel like it’s _dead._

She’s next to the console, and so she leans herself against it, pressing her hand into the floor and closing her eyes. Reaching out with her mind, throwing a flare into the dark, the _nothing_ –

Silence.

Dread latches onto her lungs with frozen hands.

“ _No no no no no,_ ” she murmurs, her mind screaming into the psychic abyss. “Come on, old girl, don’t leave me please _please_ –”

And there, on the furthest edges of the empty, there’s a flicker. A fluttering echo.

She’s not dead. Not awake, but not _dead._

The Doctor lets out a shuddery breath, pure and unadulterated _relief_ pouring through her synapses. They’re not out of the woods, not by a long shot, but she can bring the TARDIS back from this. She isn’t just a shell. There’s something left to fix, and her oldest, most faithful friend isn’t going to leave her. The tightness in her chest loosens as a sense of clarity begins to come to her through her pounding headache. Fix this. Yes, there’ll be a lot to fix probably, if they’ve crashed and the TARDIS has retreated so far into herself. Lots of repairs. Lots of –

She looks up, towards the door. Towards the sound of the whistling wind.

The doors are pushed open, pale sand piling at the entrance. Daylight is pouring in.

Where is she?

A chill runs down her spine as her injured head supplies her with _crucial_ information that should have occurred to her as soon as she woke up. Very few things can hurt a TARDIS so much that it retreats so far into itself. Very few things can _kill_ a TARDIS. Extreme temporal disturbances. Temporal _weapons_ , like the kind they used in the Time War that twisted people into paradoxes and tore TARDISes apart. And then _dimensional_ displacement, like when she’d been the one with the brown coat and the hair (– and Rose…and Mickey, he’d been there too). They’d fallen through the void between universes, tumbling through the multiversal bulk from one dimensional brane to another. That time, she really _had_ thought the TARDIS was dead, until she’d found that single power cell, burning bright in the darkness. And then the other time, in the pocket universe with House – that time the soul of the TARDIS had been _ripped_ from her casing so a monster could feast on her artron energy. But – and she manages a smile – the TARDIS had been too strong for House. It hadn’t stood a chance.

Wherever she’s landed…it must be intolerable for the TARDIS.

 _Or_ something is actively _eating_ the TARDIS. Sort of the same thing, slightly different set of solutions.

 _OR…_ something happened _before_ they crashed. That _made_ them crash? Did they get hit by something? She screws her eyes shut and tries to _think think think come on stupid come on_ –

They’d been flying through the time vortex, she remembers that. Then had come the flurry of alarms. The mournful tone of the cloister bell before everything had tipped sideways.

A flicker of fear darts through her chest, like a bird fluttering to hide in tree branches.

She may be stranded here. Wherever ‘here’ is. In a dark, comatose TARDIS. Alone.

She looks over to the open doors. To the sand and the light.

Well, she supposes. There’s only one thing for it, really.

The landscape stretches out to the horizon in a panorama of sand and endless blue sky, with mesas rising up out of the dust as far as the eye can see. It reminds her of a place on Earth – Monument Valley, she thinks it’s called. She’d been there, back when she was The Chin, with Amy and Rory and River, by the lake –

She closes her eyes for a moment.

The memory of it is so vivid, like she can hear their laughter. The way the smile tugged at the corner of Amy’s mouth.

The look in River’s eyes as she’d killed him.

She opens her eyes again.

The rock on this planet is a deep, greyish purple, rather than the bright red of the American stone. She clings to that fact, dragging herself out of the memory, gritting her teeth in frustration.

Head injuries. She's not a fan.

The TARDIS has crashed in a mostly upright position part way up a rocky slope, littered with crags that reach upwards to a plateau. The Doctor had scrambled her way up it – perhaps less than wisely, considering how everything was still spinning with a concussion-induced lurch. But she’d made it, albeit at a slower pace than she’d have _liked_. The view had been worth getting to the top for, though, even with the memories that had come with it.

The view doesn’t _tell_ her much, however.

She can’t place this planet, other than the sand tastes vaguely of the back end of the Kuronos system, which only _really_ tells her that wherever she is, it’s well out of the way. Not many ships coming through here. Not many _civilisations_ out here, as far as she knows. Which meant there probably isn’t a handy little trading post nearby where she could get some supplies.

_Unless…_

She frowns.

There’s a good chance something pulled the TARDIS down to this planet. Tore them out of the time vortex to trap them here.

And something like _that…_ well, that would require power and technology. A _lot_ of it. And something like that _theoretically_ could be automated…a left-behind relic, long forgotten. But she doubts it. Something like that would need maintaining. Manning.

And means that there’s someone on this planet who either wants a _TARDIS…_ or a _timelord._

The idea of _either_ of those options sends chills down her spine, even in the blistering sun.

She squints, shielding her eyes against the glare and looking out again. There’s got to be something there. _Something._ Some kind of answer.

But there’s only sand.

Dust in her eyes.

Abruptly, _vividly_ , the image of a ravaged cityscape screams through her mind, the memory overwhelming her –

– falling to her knees before her home,  
orange dust whipped up by the wind,  
getting in her hair, her _clothes,  
_under her fingernails where she digs her hands into the ground,  
and with a flicker of panic she realises the others will notice,  
she’ll have to clean herself up before they see,  
scrub away the evidence of everything she is  
before they notice, _out, out, OUT damned spot –_

With a sickening jolt, reality slips back into place, and she finds herself kneeling, far away from Gallifrey and her friends. The sand beneath her fingernails is pale yellow.

A pained groan escapes her lips, and she presses her hands to her face like she can stop the world spinning if she hides from it.

“Stop it,” she tells her concussion. “You’re being very _rude._ ”

Her concussion, of course, pays no attention at all.

She focuses on fixing the TARDIS after that, if only to be out of the relentless sun, digging around under the console for any sort of power cell, anything she can use to kick start her again. She ends up in a tangle of cables and tools several hours later, with nothing to show for her pains. At least, she thinks it’s been hours. There’s something about this place that makes time move strangely. Initially, she’s certain it’s just her concussion that’s knocked her temporal senses out of whack – it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?

But it _would_ , she realises. She never knows when she is after a _regeneration_ , but that’s different. That’s every cell in her body ravaged and reborn in an unworldly fire, not just her brain being shaken around. She’s had plenty of knocks to the head in her time, and they _never_ normally disorient her to this extent.

The looming sense of something being _wrong_ that she’d felt when she first woke up returns, like cold fingers creeping up the back of her neck.

She needs to know more about this place.

Because if she can’t find a way to wake the TARDIS up, it might be the key to figuring a way out of this mess.

She escapes from the heap of cables, patting the side of the console gently as she moves towards the doorway. It’s still open, the glaring desert light pouring into the dimness of the console room.

“I’ll be back soon, old girl,” she says, sending a telepathic image into the TARDIS’s circuits like a boat pushed out into a pitch black sea. The image is old – ancient, even – a burnt orange sky scattered with constellations she still knows the names of, framed by the red grass she used to lie in.

It shouldn’t be a comfort, to think of a world that’s now destroyed. But that memory has been with her for so long now. Somehow, it doesn't make her think of fire. Just home.

The TARDIS doesn’t respond, and so she goes back out into the heat.

She walks down the slope this time until she reaches the sandy expanse below, where she pulls the sonic out of her pocket and waves it around. She squints to look at the readings against the glare – and then squints even more when the readings are ridiculous.

“Well that doesn’t make any sense,” she grumbles, giving the sonic a good shake before scanning again. The reading remains stubbornly consistent. “What are you doing that for?”

The sonic isn’t sentient, but it’s silence has a distinctly unimpressed quality that would make the TARDIS proud.

She sighs, and then looks up at the landscape in front of her. Filled with rocks and sand.

And definitely _nothing_ technological, despite the sonic’s insistence that there’s something right in front of her. She frowns, thoughts racing as she strides forwards. Ok, maybe not _definitely_ nothing. There are several possible explanations – cloaking fields, dimensional phasing, camouflage. She waves the sonic again, frowning. It doesn’t detect any kind of energy fields in front of her. Dimensional phasing, cloaking, that would _all_ require some kind of field, she’s _sure_ of it. Which means maybe this place is messing with the sonic as _well_ as the TARDIS (and, possibly, her own brain, but the jury’s still out on that one), which is _extremely_ bad news, but also makes her _extremely_ curious because what could it _be?_ What could do that? And _why?_ The more she thinks about it, the more she wants to _find it_ and maybe that’s foolish but when has she _ever_ been sensible in the face of –

Her boot catches on something, sending her sprawling into the sand in an inelegant tangle of limbs.

“Ugh,” she says, spitting sand out of her mouth. Her brain helpfully reminds her that she’s still _concussed_ and sudden movements aren’t advisable at the moment by sending the world swirling around her. She rolls her eyes, even though the concussion isn’t sentient enough to appreciate it. It _feels_ like it could be, though – this angry, vengeful thing that’s dug its painful claws into her brain. _How DARE you damage yourself like this –_

She turns to look at what she tripped over, her hair falling in front of her eyes in an unruly mess.

There’s…something sticking out of the sand.

Something _metal._

Frowning, she pushes herself up, ignoring her complaining head as she shimmies closer.

…ah.

There had been, it turns out, a very _simple_ answer to the disparity between the sonic’s reading and what she’d been able to see.

The technology is _buried._

Eager and curious in equal measure, she digs around the protruding object with her hands, the coarse grains scraping at her skin. It takes a minute or so (– or more, her sense of time really is _off_ in this place –), but eventually she uncovers it enough to yank it out of the sand. It’s spherical and small, just larger than her hand. It’s also rather generic-looking, with no distinctive tells to indicate which civilisation it might have come from. The only thing she can really gather from it is that it’s _old._ Weathered. She frowns, turning it over in her hand, before waving the sonic over it and glancing at the readings. _Ah!_ The sphere is the casing for a part of some kind. Something useful.

She sonics it again. _Open open open._

It does not open.

She screws up her face, before trying again. _Unlock unlock unlock._

Nothing.

Her expression turns into a scowl. “Now that’s just rude.”

She sighs, considering. She can take it back to the TARDIS – there’s tools in there to get it open in a more old-fashioned way, involving an approach that’s a bit more violent. But now she’s not only curious about what’s _inside_ and whether it’ll be useful to her, but also _who made it._

If someone made it…that suggests there’s _someone_ here.

Lots of someones, maybe.

Lots of someones who have the ability to make a device that won’t yield to her efforts – now _that’s_ someone she’d like to talk to. She pushes herself up, throwing the sphere in the air once and catching it again in her hand before she begins to trudge onwards, new goals blooming in her mind. Oh, if _only_ the TARDIS was up and running – she could be running wider scans that the sonic couldn’t manage and be looking for settlements, signs of life. She looks at the sphere again and wonders what kind of people would make a device like this. A little paranoid, maybe. Or just private. She can understand that. She knows how it is to keep secrets.

She knows that all too well.

She tucks the sphere into her pocket, which helpfully doesn’t bulge with the shape thanks to some fancy dimensional needle work she’d done not long after she’d first bought the coat. She could remember Yaz’s face while she’d watched her do it – bemusement and curiosity trading for unadultered astonishment as she’d realised the pockets were now _significantly_ larger. _I could do with a few of those,_ she’d quipped, and the Doctor had smiled. The memory is clear and bright, and she can smell the tea she’d been drinking back then, tannins filling her senses. She shakes her head.

She wonders where Yaz is now.

Where Ryan and Graham are now.

She’d dropped them off after their little adventure with Nikola Tesla, promising to be back within an hour, so they’re probably not _far_. In Sheffield, anyway. Maybe they’re still stood outside the TARDIS where she’d pushed them out the door, hurt and confused and _worried._ The worry is the worst. She can barely stand their looks of concern, and their frequency is increasing. An upwards curve, plottable on a coordinates plane. She can see it – the sweeping, exponential arc.

But she can’t bear to be _without_ them either.

Loneliness is, somehow, worse.

For a while, before, it hadn’t been so bad – but then, the silence hadn’t been so empty. The Master had been there, hanging on like a parasite at the back of her mind. Their connection, reopened in Paris and not adequately shut off, had been almost overwhelming as he’d laughed at her lack of understanding and _raged_ at her grief.

But it has been silent for weeks now. The connection torn out, severed.

She’s been looking for him ever since.

Her working theory is that he’s now escaped the Kasaavin realm (somehow, because he _always_ escapes somehow) and now he doesn’t need _her_ to entertain him. Like some weird sitcom that actually listens when you shout at the TV. Of course, if he’s _escaped_ that probably means he’s planning something, and he doesn’t want her getting sneak previews before the main event.

She just hopes that whatever it is, she doesn’t lose someone else.

She’s so tired of losing people.

It would shatter her, she’s sure. One last strike of the hammer against already cracked glass, the mirror splintering into shimmering shards. She’d be left, kneeling, trying to put herself back together and just cutting her hands on the pieces.

She pushes the thoughts out of mind. She doesn’t want to think about the Master, she tells herself. She wants to figure this place _out._

It’s impossible for her to tell how much time passes as she walks, tripping over more unidentifiable scraps as she goes. The seconds and minutes move strangely, lurching, and the present blows past her like sand picked up by the wind, unearthing memories buried beneath. They are so vivid here, in a way they shouldn’t be. She tries not to think, filling her head with endless orange sky, but it’s _hard._ Hopeless, even. She begins to wonder if maybe this _isn’t_ just a symptom of a hard knock to the head. She thinks of the TARDIS, sunk deep in hypersleep. Something affected her…and it’s affecting the Doctor too.

A cliff face looms, and eventually she reaches it, coming to a stop at the entrance to a rocky pass. Her dizziness and general _offness_ is persistent, if not worsening, but she ignores it. It’s probably just the sun. By this point, the harshness of it beating down on her had made it feel like the skin on her scalp was going to peel off, so she’s pulled her hood up. It’s _hot,_ though. Stiflingly so. But something little like _that_ has never stopped her before. She can imagine the others trailing behind her – Graham would be complaining at the heat, Ryan kicking at the sand where they’d stopped and watching the way it caught in the breeze. Yaz would be beside her, looking at her as she stares at the purple stone that opens up ahead of her.

 _“What’s the plan, Doctor?”_ she’d be asking. She can practically hear her, feel an adjacent timeline brush past her where she hadn’t dumped them all in Sheffield, where they were marooned her _with_ her. So close, but out of her reach. The Doctor considers this, some of the pieces beginning to come together. _Yes…_ she can feel it here. Whatever _it_ is.

“The _plan,_ ” she says out loud to her temporal ghosts, decision abruptly made, “is to do _this!_ ”

She pulls out the sonic with an overdramatic flourish, the end lighting up with a familiar high-pitched whine.

“Something’s _different_ here,” she explains. “Have you noticed? Maybe not, you lot are a bit less sensitive to this sort of thing than me – aha!” She pulls back her sonic and grins at the results. “Yes! A temporal tear! And a pretty big one, at that. Oh, and a dimensional one too, by the looks of things – oh, of _course_ , I’ve been feeling them both _ever since_ I got here.”

She starts walking forwards between the small canyon, moving her hands animatedly to her invisible audience. Part of her wonders if maybe they really _can_ hear her. If there really are dimensional tears, the walls between timelines could be thin, creating spectral illusions in the overlap. Maybe she’s not just talking to herself for once…

It’s probably just her concussed brain warping reality. But the idea settles in her chest like a dragonfly on an outstretched hand, comforting, and she doesn’t dare disturb it.

She really does hate being alone.

“ _A temporal tear? What’s that when it’s at home?”_ she hears Graham ask.

“It’s what it sounds like! A rip in time, a moth-hole in the fabric of reality! Past, present and future become all tangled and concurrent and messy. Like when you throw a bunch of cables in a box and you come back to it twenty years later and they’re all knotted together. To a time-sensitive species like mine there’s just a _wrongness_. And the dizziness. And memories, those come easy too. Your thoughts run away with themselves and a couple of spades and they dig things up –”

“ _You sure it’s not just from hitting your head, though?_ ” Ryan asks, and she can imagine his brow puckering with concern.

“Just because they share similar symptoms!” she complains, exasperated. “Besides! The sonic never lies – objective evidence! Ha!”

“ _But I don’t understand, Doctor,_ ” asks Yaz, her frown seeping into her voice. “ _What’ve these tears got to do with anything? Are they why the TARDIS crashed?”_

“Great question, Yaz!” she answers with a grin. “Answer – possibly. They’re definitely what’s making the TARDIS _unhappy_. Temporal and dimensional tears are like a really _bad_ migraine to her. No, worse than that. Staying here too long would hurt her, make her _sick_. So _normally_ , she avoids landing anywhere like this.”

“ _So…why did she?"_

The Doctor stops, closing her eyes.

The TARDIS hadn’t had a choice this time, had she?

She thinks back tentatively, brushing against the edges of the concussion-blurred memory. That’s all it takes – she’s close enough here to the temporal disturbance that it all comes screeching back into her mind with the subtlety of a freight train with no brakes. She can practically see it – the burst of sparks. The violent rocking of the TARDIS like a lifeboat tossed into a storm. The cloister bell ringing in her ears.

The screen in front of her had been covered with a scattering of Gallifreyan, and her blood had chilled as she’d read it.

Her eyes open.

“We were pulled in here,” she announces, to the rock and her friends in their adjacent timeline. “Something pulled us in. Forced us to land.”

Forced them to land in a place that would ground a TARDIS.

She strides forward again, letting the adjacent timeline slip from her fingers. In the back of her mind, the sense of her friends’ presence fades.

It’s a good thing, probably, that they’re not stuck with her.

At least she doesn’t have to pretend for anyone except herself.

It’s then that the canyon twists around to the right before opening out into a wider space, and she stops, surprised.

The space is filled with the strangest rock formation she’s ever seen.

Once, back in that first week after Grace had died but while they were waiting for the funeral, the Doctor had been extremely bored and, having found a handful of pennies on the side, had entertained herself by getting them to stand upright in formation on the kitchen table. These rocks look _just_ like that, circular monuments standing upright in the sand, the tallest about twice her height. For a moment, she tries to puzzle out how this could be a _natural_ phenomenon, before quickly discarding the idea. These had been _made_ by someone, without a doubt. The shapes are far too precise, too equally spaced to be natural. And, she realises as she moves towards the closest, a line of runes runs along the circumference, untranslated by the TARDIS. The sense of wrongness has only grown, building in her chest, and she frowns, reaching out to run her hand along the wind-worn surface of the stone.

The moment her skin touches the surface, her mind explodes.

Memories, bright and blinding, shatter into her consciousness in a scattering of incoherence. The night sky over Gallifrey twisting into an explosion at Skull Moon into the screams of the Nightmare Child at the Gates of Elysium into watching nebulas with her feet hanging out of the TARDIS doors into a hand clasping his ankle in the dark into his hand running along the stone wall of a castle into his fist hammering against a wall of azbantium into the lights and whines of all his enemies in the skies above Stonehenge into a lighthouse on a British shoreline into the choking smell of smoke into the clink of mugs in Yaz’s kitchen into stumbling through endless sand in the dark into _everything_. Past, present and future torqueing and ripping around her as the explosion in time latches onto her, hungry and desperate and _unrelenting_ and somewhere someone is screaming (– _she_ is screaming –) but she can’t let go she can’t _get away she HAS TO GET AWAY –_

With a gargantuan psychic burst that is more instinctive than anything else, she pushes herself away from the monument, physically flying backwards a couple of metres and sprawling into the sand. With the connection now severed, her mind is no longer being ripped apart by the temporal disturbance. But she can still feel it at the edges of her thoughts, rippling past memories that have been flayed raw. Her headache is so much worse now, a landslide of pressure behind her eyes, but she ignores it, carefully pushing herself to her feet instead. Dread is climbing up her throat, holding back her breath.

She knows exactly what’s just happened.

It’s happened to her before. Not for a long time, no, but from a very _specific_ time in her life.

A time in her life she does _not_ want to unearth here, in the burning sand.

She sidesteps carefully, moving around the monument. As she changes her angle, she catches a glimpse of it, the object she knew would be hidden between the stones. She understands what they are now – a _warning._

Her angle aligns with the position of the stones, and she sees it fully.

A metallic, copper-like box with rounded edges. It radiates distorted time energy so intense that she can barely stand to look at it directly. There are engravings around the rim, and she’s nowhere near close enough to read them but it doesn’t matter. She already knows what the language is.

Gallifreyan.

“ _No no no_ ,” she moans. “You shouldn’t _be here._ Why are you _here?”_

The box, though silent, seems to be laughing at her.

She moves backwards, behind the protection of the stones. It’s a weapon. A weapon she is far too familiar with, a weapon that shouldn’t _be here_. Last time she’d stumbled across one of these she’d been old and grizzled, wrapped in a warbeaten jacket and hiding behind cold, desperate eyes. It had been buried, but unmarked, and she – he, back then – had fallen beside it to avoid a volley of dalek fire. There’d been a group of them, running for their lives. He’d had just enough time to scramble away before someone had made the mistake of stepping on it. A time mine.

The resulting explosion had nearly ripped his timeline apart. He’d been lurching from second to second for weeks after, his sense of time eroded and images of his past and future flickering constantly in the back of his mind, disorientating. Distracting, in a time when he couldn’t _afford_ to be distracted. There were more coming, and he had to keep moving, keep alert, and his hearts were beating so loud in his chest he was sure they could hear him, would _find him –_

She catches herself before she falls further into the memory, torqueing her thoughts back into the present.

That time mine is wrong in more ways than one.

One – the most obvious – it shouldn’t be here. The Time War might have raged across time as well as space, but it was _contained_. She knows, because she’d been the one to seal the lock, drawing an unbreachable line in the sand between hell and the rest of the universe. She isn’t within the Time Lock now, she’s _sure_ of it. She would _know if she was._ So how did this weapon get here? How has it been here so long that someone was able to build this monument around it? How did they get _close_ enough?

Two – the next obvious – why is it still _active?_ Time mines are nasty, full of compressed probabilities, potentialities and hypotheticals ready to blow – but they are _quick._ One explosion, not prolonged. Not like this. Somehow, this time mine is still active. Stuck in a superstition state at the peak of the blast, entangled and constant.

Three – the least obvious, and the most _concerning_ – time mines might create scars in the temporal fabric of reality, but they _don’t_ rip holes in time itself. They _definitely_ don’t rip holes in the dimensional fabric between _universes,_ bringing adjacent timelines together like she’d experienced only a few minutes ago.

She doesn’t like this.

She doesn’t like _any of this._

Scrambling to her feet, dizzy and time-disoriented, jagged memories digging into her psyche, she runs back the way she came. The pieces of scrap that she’d passed by before in the sand start to jump out at her, familiar shapes now fitting in her mind, matching memories with a sickening snap. Part of the hull of a dalek battleship, twisted and bent out of shape. Half of a broken relative drift compensator from a battle TARDIS. A shattered limbo atrophier. With each piece she recognises, a theory solidifies in her mind, chilling her to the core in spite of the persistent desert heat.

These are all relics of the Time War.

Scraps – nothing more than shards of shrapnel – but they _shouldn’t be here_ , on this backwater planet. Had the edges of the Time War somehow escaped the Time Lock, junkyards and abandoned battlefields still spinning on unchecked?

Or maybe there was something here, drawing in objects with high levels of artron energy – and anything from the Time War would be _buzzing_ with that. Something that fed off time – or something _powered_ by time –

Her dizziness overcomes her for a moment, and she makes the mistake of wondering if she should stop or keep going. In the moment of indecision, her frayed time sense splits along the Jonbar Hinge, two alternative timelines branching off – one where she stops and one where she doesn’t. _Gah!_ A wave of nausea sweeps through her, but she grits her teeth and walks through it, determined. No uncertainty. She will keep walking until she reaches the TARDIS.

The timelines calm, merging together in the face of her strengthened resolve. The quantum foam settles.

And she walks.

She is covered in dust by the time she steps through the TARDIS doors. Memories come forth unbidden – _orange dust under her feet; orange dust under her fingernails; Yaz questioning the grains that still cling to her coat hours later_ – but she resolutely ignores them, instead reaching into her pocket with a sureness that defied any quantum branching. She pulls out the sphere she’d tripped over earlier – almost certainly another Time War relic, she realises – and places it on a nook in the dead console before yanking up a hexagonal panel in the floor. It clatters down as she lets go too early, more interested in dragging the tools she needs out from underneath. Within minutes, the sphere is back in her hand again and she is sitting on the floor, hacking at it with a laser spanner.

It takes time – the exact amount of which escapes her completely – but eventually the metal pries apart, two halves falling open in her hands. The inside rim is thick metal with four ducts leading to the outer surface, each with a small but sturdy mechanism keeping the ducts firmly closed. Connected to all of them, embedded in the core, is another mechanism and a small cluster of powercells. Gallifreyan is etched into the inside, footnotes of technical writing that were typical in the early days of the War, and grew less common as it raged on. People didn’t need the warnings or the instructions after a while. She runs her thumb over the writing, thinking about the person who must have scratched the words into the metal. The device was clearly improvised, but intended to be used more than once.

With a frown, she investigates the mechanism further, her intense focus chasing off the ghosts in the back of her mind. It looks like some kind of rough-shod temporal grenade – the sort of thing a timelord would tie to their own timeline in order to stabilise it, before ripping it away the moment they needed it to detonate. The force of it would make the grenade reach out, desperate and hungry, leeching off the timelines of anyone standing close enough, chewing them up until nothing was left.

“Ah,” she says, suddenly realising _quite_ how dangerous it is. She puts it down carefully. “Ok then.”

But it appears inert. Maybe it was activated and never got reattached to its user’s timeline. Or maybe…the person who was using it died before they were able to pull the pin.

In the end, she supposes it doesn’t matter. The Time War is _over._ The only thing that matters now is that this device has given her _exactly_ what she needs to wake up her TARDIS.

She spends the next few hours carefully disabling the mechanism until she’s able to extract the powercells. Memories of being trapped in Pete’s World bubble up unbidden – digging beneath the console room in the darkness and pulling out that pinprick of light, glowing green in the palm of her hand. Hope. She’d looked up at Mickey, grinning. _Their way back home._ He really hadn’t thought he’d manage it this time, but he _always_ finds a way because he really is that brilliant, or maybe just that lucky –

Grimacing, she shakes the memory out, wincing at the pounding of her persistent headache. She draws herself back to reality with considerable effort. Powercells. Right – _right_. The powercells will work – and then if she can get systems back online, she can run diagnostics, see what needs to be fixed, fix it and get _out_ of this place.

Four steps. That’s all.

She keeps on working, even as the light outside the TARDIS doors grows red with dusk, before deepening into night. The wind keeps whistling, a wordless witness as always. She tries to stop her mind wandering. Keep it focused on the task at hand, and not the images that push themselves to the forefront of her mind as she works. But she’s tired, and that’s her downfall. The others had been noticing, before she dumped them back in Sheffield, that she’d barely been sleeping, and the truth is she really hasn’t _properly slept_ since she saw Gallifrey in ruins. But she can’t – she knows what she’ll see behind her eyes and she can’t bear the thought of it.

Distantly, she notices her eyes drooping. Her head nodding. She should shake herself awake, keep working. Yes, that’s exactly what she’ll do. She’ll do it in any moment now. She’ll…

There’s sand piling in the open doorway.

She gets to her feet, clambering down the wooden ladder in the barn with a familiar ease. She must have forgotten to close it overnight – only she _never_ does that, in case the darkness gets in. The wind must have blown it inwards. How long has it been open? The build-up of sand suggests a good few hours at least. A few hours. She turns, glancing over the room. Something could have got in. Something from the darkness, and they all say that there’s nothing in the darkness that isn’t there in the light but that isn’t a _comfort,_ not to the small boy who feels so alone, so afraid –

“I know what got in,” says an achingly familiar voice by her side. She turns, and a sense of relief floods her.

“Koschei,” she says. He smiles like a shark, placing a hand on the dull red material of her sleepshirt.

“It’s just here, look,” he says, letting go and moving past her. He heads straight up to where her bed is, peering underneath. “Come on, Theta! It’s ok!”

Cautious, she traces his steps back up the ladder. Her limbs feel slow, like the air is denser somehow. It’s hard to move.

She does not want to look under the bed.

“Come on!” Koschei looks up at her, his young eyes sparking with excitement. He grabs her hand and pulls her down. “Don’t be scared.”

He’s too strong, and she ends up on the floor beside him. Under the bed is a young girl in orange robes, her eyes closed. She looks asleep, but Theta _knows_ she’s dead.

“What –?” she tries to ask, before a memory splices it’s way in –

_– the girl stands, alone, at the foot of the tower,  
and stretched out in the sky above her is the rift,  
chaotic bristling flares of purples – _

_– the timeless child –_

The images switch out as violently as they appeared, and she finds herself back in the barn, staring at the child under the bed. This time, the girl is on fire. The flames lick at the wooden floor and the frame of the bed, catching alight. She flinches back, trying to get away, but the fire is already spreading so fast, faster than she can escape. Koschei reaches out, grabbing the sky-blue sleeve of her coat. His face is older now – his newest face, the one whose eyes blaze with so much rage. She’s older now too, so ancient she can hardly breathe under the weight of it.

The Master pulls her close, his cheek against hers, his lips brushing the shell of her ear.

“Don’t you see it?” he whispers, furiously gentle in the way only he can be. “ _Don’t you_ _feel it?_ ”

He pulls away, his eyes meeting hers.

“ _We’re not what we think we are.”_

She jerks awake, hitting her head on the underside of the console.

“Agh!” she says, pressing her hand against the bloom of pain. A dream, just a dream. She winces, trying to reorient herself, wondering why something feels off, missing, until she abruptly realises it’s the TARDIS. Every other time she’s woken up from a dream – a _nightmare_ – the TARDIS has been there, soothing psychic rhythms drifting through her mind. Now, there’s just nothing. A withered tree, standing alone in the desert.

She runs a hand through her hair and sighs, screwing her eyes shut for a moment. Letting out a sound of desperate frustration. It hangs in the air for a moment, before it disperses, like atoms filling the space around her.

“Please,” she whispers to her ship. “Please come back to me.”

But the TARDIS can’t answer. The TARDIS needs her to keep going. To never give up, never give in.

The fires still flicker in the back of her mind. But she opens her eyes and reaches out for the powercells.

She won’t give up.

It’s in her name, after all.

The sun is high in the sky by the time she ventures out the next day, her hood up to shield her from the inevitable waves of ultraviolet radiation. The skin on her nose is already sore from yesterday, red and peeling. It’s irritating, but manageable. She can imagine Graham shaking his head, saying she should have put on sunscreen. He’d said something about it before, back on the planet Desolation after he’d already taken her very nice sunglasses. Something about ozone layers and then confusion regarding whether alien planets even _had_ an ozone –

She grits her teeth, biting back a growl as she kicks at the sand.

The effects of these tears in spacetime are getting _old_ very fast.

Because that’s the thing – there wasn’t just the disturbances around the time mine. She’s found _multiple_ occurrences, both temporal and dimensional, dotted around all over the place in no obvious pattern. There’s so much more Time War wreckage too, scattered into the sand and ready to trip her up at any moment. For a while, she thought that it was these wartime relics that were causing the disturbances, but now she’s not so sure, because it doesn’t _add up_. Some of the items are just _shrapnel,_ hunks of metal with no active time elements. Just broken pieces. But they’re still here. So maybe, _maybe_ , she thinks, maybe the disturbances are the _cause,_ not the effect. Maybe they were here already, naturally occurring, and they just connected to the War, a period _reeking_ with entangled temporal spaghetti, and ended up as…the end of a temporal garbage chute?

It made more sense when she didn’t try and put it into words.

But regardless – the point is that as a result a huge amount of _junk_ from the Time War has ended up scattered around this planet. Junk that might have parts she can use to fix the TARDIS. Earlier that morning, she’d finished working with the powercells, jacking them into the ship’s circuits to give her the boost she needed to wake up again. It’ll take about 24 Earth-hours for it to work, and normally measuring that time passing wouldn’t be a problem for the Doctor. Even on another planet and without any kind of time-keeping mechanism, her sense of time was impeccable. She could practically _feel it,_ the seconds and moments ticking onwards, continuous, the constant flow of time in the back of her head. Soothing, almost. Familiar, like the sound of the wind. But between this place, which has temporal anomalies coming out of its ears, and the lingering effects of the time mine, there’s no chance. It’s become like trying to read a language she doesn’t know when she’s _used_ to it being her mother tongue.

Disorientating, to say the least.

But there isn’t anything she can do about it – it’s nothing wrong with _her_ , it’s just this place, and the sooner she can fix the TARDIS, the sooner they can _both_ get out of here. Get back to Sheffield, to the others. She’d told them she’d be back within an hour, hadn’t she? And that’s fine, that’s no problem, even though she’s been stuck here for longer than that already because she has a _time ship_ after all. But what if she can’t get the helmic regulator to work and she ends up coming back weeks late? Months late? _Years_ late? What if she can’t get back to them _at all_ and they live out the rest of their lives thinking that she left them, that she _abandoned them_ and –

Maybe that would be for the best.

It’s bound to happen eventually, anyway.

It seems to be the only way things go with her, these days. She leaves them behind, or they never make it home.

At least this way they will be alive to resent her.

She’s walking in different direction to the way she travelled the previous day, trying to collect as much data as she can on these anomalies. She’s also scoping out for any scrap that might come in handy – parts that aren’t _completely_ filled with sand might help her fix the other parts of the ship that fared badly in the crash, although she’s had little luck finding anything good so far. As well as that – because she’s a sucker for multi-tasking, can’t keep herself focused with just _one_ thing going at once – she’s figuring out this planet. Doesn’t seem to be much in the way of wildlife, although she has seen a few lone bird-like creatures circling high above her. Other than that, though, the place seems desolate. She scrunches her face up at the thought. It’s _not_ desolate, though, she’s sure of it. There _are_ people here. Otherwise who made the monument around the malfunctioning time mine? And who pulled her TARDIS here?

There’s someone out here in the sand, and she’s going to find out who it is even if –

A sound breaks her out of her thoughts.

She turns, her coat whipping in a flurry behind her. She’s not in open sand anymore, and there are rocky outcrops jutting out all around her. Hiding places. Perfect for an ambush. She stays stock still as she tries to reach out psychically, feeling for anything around her. But – nothing. There’s nothing, just –

A twisted figure emerges from behind a rock. Distorted. _Wrong_ in a way the Doctor wishes she didn’t recognise. Then another appears, closer. And another, from the opposite side. And another, and another –

With a sickening abruptness, she realises her mistake.

It hadn’t been _nothing._

It had been an _absence._ Like a black hole, you don’t see _it,_ you see the absence of _light_ as it sucks it all in, _voracious._ These creatures are an absence of _time,_ their bodies warped into monstrous shapes and their faces stretched into a permanent scream. Her breath catches in her throat and she takes a step back. Neverweres, that’s what they are. Soldiers from the Time War who got hit by temporal weapons, ended up with their timelines chewed out and gobbled up until this is all that’s left – husks, shells, every second a screaming hoard of agony and _emptiness_. These are creatures that, literally, have no time left.

They were almost certainly timelords once.

She pushes the thought from her mind.

“Alright then,” she says to the Neverweres, even though she knows they won’t understand her. They’re just like animals running on instinct, she thinks, taking a few careful steps back. “Hiya, guys. You seem like reasonable monstrosities.”

They’re moving closer – walking, if you could call their aborted movements _walking,_ but not running. Somehow, that’s even more disturbing. Like they know they don’t need to run. Like no matter how far she’s goes, they’ll follow. They’ll catch her anyway.

She’s not going to be able to reason with them.

She isn’t trying, she’s just –

Buying time.

While she thinks of a plan.

She glances around in her peripheral vision, thinking back – what had she seen ahead of her, before she turned around? Just sand. More rocks. Had there been anything in the sand? What had she _seen–_

– _what did I see, I SAW IT, what did I see!_ he thinks, standing on Leadworth green  
whilst the humans stand with phones pointed to the sky,  
the Atraxi are preparing to burn their entire planet,  
but there’s one  
just one  
who is looking the wrong way  
who is looking the _right way_  
and so he turns –  
  


– a shout of frustration leaves her lips as the memory overwhelms her senses, and by the time she snaps back to reality the Neverweres are all around her, closer, faster, hissing with a keening urgency like they can _smell_ her timeline, tangled and beautiful, convoluted and _scarred…_ but intact.

She would taste so sweet to them.

She has no plan – other than the one she always has.

With a flick of her heels in the sand, she turns and breaks into a run, darting up the rocks to her left in the only trajectory that looks viable. She scrambles, rough purple sandstone against her hands, not daring to risk a glance behind her. Her mind narrows down onto the terrain before her, lurching foothold to foothold, second to second, forcing her mind to stay clear so she doesn’t trigger another memory –

By Rassilon, memories of a timetraveller. It’s like drops of blood in a pool full of starved piranhas.

She reaches the top of the ridge, and that’s when the first hand grabs at the corner of her coat, yanking her back down. With a yelp, she loses her footing, scraping her knees as she drops down before she pushes up again, pulling at her coat with desperation. She doesn’t let herself look back, terror choking her chest with panicked breaths – she’s seen what these things can do to a timelord if they catch up and she doesn’t want that she _doesn’t want to be like them –_

She nearly slips again as another hand grabs the end of her coat, but she catches herself, and with a burst of strength she pulls herself away. The two closest Neverweres let go, falling backwards and down the rocks, but the others have caught up now, crawling up faster than she’s been climbing. She makes the mistake of looking over her shoulder only to see one right by her, hollow eyesockets somehow seeing right into her timeline. It reaches out, grabbing at her sleeve with long, twisted fingers and she can _feel_ it’s nothingness, it’s all-encompassing emptiness that it desperate to consume her too –

– and he remembers running through the battlefields of Skull Moon  
the hordes of travesties – Neverweres and Meanwhiles in their thousands  
panic bursting in his chest  
as he runs and runs and runs –

She _screams –_ they’re _swarming_ her now, all over her, one ice-like hand clenching around her ankle with a grip that _burns_ her, the rest are pulling at her coat but there’s a chance a chance, one chance she’s almost back at the top of the ridge so if she can just –

With a frustrated, terrified shout, the Doctor wriggles out of her coat and wrestles herself away, making one last push for the top. Half the Neverweres fall back, still clinging to the fluttering blue fabric – oh, and she really loves that coat – but the others are still coming, still crawling towards her and she’s standing on the edge of the ridge, looking down at the drop below and thinking _that’s survivable, right?_

She really doesn’t have time to think any more about it.

She leaps.

There are voices.

Her head hurts.

The wind whistles through the wooden slats of the walls. She shifts, nestling herself under the rough blankets. It’s warm – hot, even – but she doesn’t want to move. She is nothing but aches and drowsiness, her awareness lost in the haze. Maybe in a minute, she’ll go look for it. But right now, she doesn’t _quite_ feel like it –

The voices are closer, standing over her. Her mind can’t quite grasp what they’re saying, until something like a _finger_ pokes at her shoulder. Her eyes slam open and she jerks upright, veins flooding with cortisol and her hearts thumping wildly in her throat. She scrambles back on the bed instinctively, still tangled in blankets. Opposite her, a short figure matches her movements, jumping back in shock, and the figure beside them murmurs in surprise and concern.

For a moment, none of them move.

The Doctor forces her breathing into a calmer rhythm, quickly glancing around the room she’s found herself in. Her brains are awake now, although still sluggishly trying to get with the programme after what must have been the _second_ knock to the head in the last couple of days. She’s inside what she _thinks_ is a wooden shack, lying on a little bed in an alcove against the wall. The room is dimly lit with a warm glow, sunlight coming through the gaps between the wood in thin strips. It’s reasonably sized, but not _spacious_ – there’s a round table, some little stools, and large number of utensils hung up on the walls, like pans and spoons and a dangerous-looking knife and a large stick. There are other things too – like a decorated mask, a bunch of succulent-like plants in various sized pots, assorted pieces of carved metal hanging from rope off the walls. Drawings too. Lots and _lots_ of drawings, pinned up layer upon layer on any spare space.

She takes this all in within a couple of seconds, before turning back to the figures. They are _very_ short, and their faces are mostly covered by the fabric wrapped around their heads, but their eyes peek through, small and dark. And their _ears_ – they’ve got ears for days, poking out and flattened against their heads with nervousness, tufty.

Hm. She doesn’t recognise their species, but maybe it’ll come to her.

“Hi there,” she says. “Sorry. Bad first impression, probably. Bit jumpy. Had a bad day. Bad few days. Bad week.” She winces. “Bad month.” She twists the wince into a smile. “But I’m always one to look for ways to turn things around, and making new friends is a great way of doing that!”

They blink at her.

“Right,” she ploughs on, unperturbed – ok, maybe a little bit perturbed. “I’m the Doctor. Nice to meet you. Not to be rude, but how exactly did I get here?”

They look at her for a moment, before one turns to the other and they begin chattering. The language immediately _grates_ on the Doctor’s ears. It’s _weird,_ as mismatch of words from a frankly bizarre assortment of languages – she’s pretty sure she hears some Sontaran verbs smashed next to a Mondassian idiom with a Dalek conjuction thrown on the end. She can _technically_ understand all the words, the TARDIS trying to translate, but she suddenly realises that none of it _actually_ makes _sense._ It’s like someone look the dictionary of every language in the universe, threw them into a pot, picked out random words and called it a sentence. All it does is make her headache pound even harder behind her eyes.

To the figures, however, it seems perfectly normal. They appear to agree that it’s time to leave and scurry out of the shack, their woven ponchos flapping behind them as they go.

“Hey, wait!” the Doctor says, starting to swing her legs out of the bed to follow – but the door has already slammed shut behind them.

She gets the sudden sense that maybe those were _children_ who weren’t supposed to be in there.

With a groan, she holds her head in her hands for a moment, closing her eyes against the pain. She reaches back for the last thing she remembers –

– scrambling away,  
desperate hands grabbing at her coat,  
she leaps –

Right, yes.

Carefully, she feels around her head for the injury, and quickly finds what feels like a nasty gash under her hair line, complete with crusted blood. Ughh. It had been survivable, though. That was nice. Regenerating would have been a bit awkward. Going back to the fam without her coat was one thing, but with a different _face –_

 _Ohh._ Her _coat._

She briefly considers how dangerous it would be to try and get it back from a horde of ravenous Neverweres.

If she can even _find_ the place where they’d ambushed her. She has no idea where she is now in relation to there. She doesn’t even know where she is in relation to the _TARDIS,_ which is _not_ a feeling she likes. Not at _all_. But it’s ok, she can use the sonic –

The _sonic._ She untangles herself from the blankets, throwing them off so she can pat her trouser pockets. No sonic. _No._ It must still be in her _coat,_ idiot idiot _idiot –_

Or maybe it fell out her pocket! Then it would have been near her when she fell, right? So whoever these people are, when they found her they might have picked it up and put it somewhere nearby. She pushes herself off the bed with a stumbling urgency that her head complains loudly at, but she winces through it. She _needs_ her sonic. She starts riffling through the room, looking in and under anything she comes across that could hide her prize from her.

It’s then that the door opens, and two new people appear. They’re dressed similarly to the figures from earlier, but while the first is short and stocky, though a bit bigger than the other two had been, the second is tall and lanky.

The Doctor pulls her hands out of the box she’d been sifting through. She smiles at them as the lid snaps shut with a _thunk_.

“Hi,” she says. “Sorry. Just looking for something of mine. Have you seen it? It’s metal, made of spoons, about yay-long.” She shows them with her fingers.

They look at her for a moment, before the taller one says something to the shorter in that nonsensical language of theirs. She winces at it, watching them as they mutter, then look back at her. They don’t move any closer, like they haven’t heard her at all. A sickening realisation hits her.

“You can’t understand me at all, can you?” she asks.

Maybe the TARDIS translation circuits aren’t working. That’s why their language sounds like gibberish – she might be talking in mixed up sentences to them too –

Or maybe it’s just because she hit her head again…

The tall one looks to the shorter one, who hesitates, before moving closer to the Doctor. She forces herself not to take a step back, even if she feels like a startled deer right about now. The person isn’t even _intimidating,_ only coming up to about the height of her chest. They reach out and gently take a hold of her by the elbows, before manoeuvring her back to bed.

“No, I’m fine, and actually I _really_ need to –” she tries, but even if they could understand her, she gets the feeling it wouldn’t have made any difference. She sits back down on the thin mattress with a _thump,_ and her attempt to get back up again is met by a firm push down on her shoulder. The shorter figure chatters again to the taller one, who bumbles over to one of the plant pots. The Doctor watches with interest for a moment as they take a small knife off the wall and cut off half of a large, waxy leaf, before she gets distracted by the person in front of her crouching down. She peers over to look, noticing for the first time that 1) her shoes and _socks_ are gone, 2) her _trousers_ have holes in the knees and 3) there is a bandage around her ankle. She frowns – she doesn’t _think_ her ankle hurts, but she’s soon proven wrong when the person starts to unwrap the dressing.

“ _Ah!_ ” she cries, and the person stops, looking up at her, beady eyes full of concern. The Doctor tries for a smile, but it comes out a bit pained. “Oh, it’s alright! I’m fine, keep goin’.”

The person blinks at her, before turning back to their task. Once the bandage falls away, the raw red skin beneath is revealed, sore and painful in more than a physical sense. But, of course, like many injuries, she hadn’t even registered it hurt until her attention had been drawn to it.

“Temporal burn,” she mutters to herself. The helper at her feet doesn’t look up this time, but their ears twitch at the sound of her voice. “Must have been the Neverweres. Skin-on-skin contact is never a good idea with that lot.”

The other person comes back over, carrying a small wooden plate. On it is the leaf they cut, crushed down to create a sort of paste. Probably some kind of burn salve. With a surge of trepidation, she realises they’re going to have to _touch her_ in order to apply it, and she wonders how she can tell them that she heals pretty fast anyway so there’s really no need to waste their lovely plants on her when –

The shorter person takes the plate, dips their fingers in the goop and immediately smears it over the burn.

“ _Gggggh!_ ” the Doctor says through gritted teeth, screwing her eyes shut. It’s not just the wound – it’s her stupid tactile telepathy that’s always been so sensitive in this body, and with her head all tender and pounding, the scintillating feeling of this other being’s emotions – _concern, focus, curiosity, oh so much curiosity –_ is like twisting an ice-pick into her eye.

It’s not like the salve is even going to _help_ anything other than the surface of the injury. The nitty gritty of it – the scabbing over of her timeline – is all down to _her,_ her body gradually fixing itself on her own terms.

But these people are trying to _help_ in the only way they know, so she resists the urge to yank her ankle away. They’d probably just grab it again if she tried, and that would _really_ hurt.

It’s over in a few moments anyway, and they quickly wrap the injury up again before moving on to her head. They leave the salve this time, deciding just to wash the injury with a wet cloth. It’s only then that she realises how thirsty she is, her tongue like sandpaper against the roof of her mouth. When did she last have a drink? How long has she _been_ here? She tries to pluck the time out of the air, but yet again it escapes her grasp. She scowls. Stupid planet. Stupid temporal anomalies. Stupid person-and/or-machine who made her TARDIS crash here.

The short figure pats her forehead carefully in an affectionate gesture, before pushing down on her shoulder as if to say _stay there,_ before moving away. They head through another doorway and presumably into another room, followed by their taller companion. The Doctor frowns. She doesn’t think _these_ people are the ones who brought her TARDIS down. She doesn’t mean any _offence_ by it, but they’re not exactly on the technologically advanced side of things, and besides they seem _far_ too polite to be the sort who would intentionally make someone’s ship crash in the middle of a desert.

They might _know_ about the person-or-machine responsible though.

If only they could _understand_ each other.

She bites back a growl of frustration and flops back down onto the bed. She’ll figure it out, _she will_ , because she’s brilliant, but right now her head is screaming quite a bit and she’d quite like her coat and her sonic and her TARDIS back and to not be anywhere near this place, thank you very much.

She closes her eyes and listens to the wind.

There’s a pat on her shoulder. She opens her eyes a squint to see the shorter figure stood beside the bed. They’re holding out a leather canteen, and she reaches over to take it. She sits up and has a grateful swig from it, only grimacing slightly at the taste of the water. She passes it back, but the person pushes it back towards her.

“Oh, alright,” she says dumbly, putting it down on the bed. “Thank you.”

The person pats her forehead again, and the Doctor doesn’t quite manage to duck away in time.

“Gah, ok.” She shifts backwards. “Alright. I’m pretty sure I’m just making sounds to you, but I really need to get out and find my coat.” She points to the door meaningfully as she shimmies to the other end of the bed before swinging her legs over the edge, putting her bare feet on the floor. “Oh, no _boots_.” She glances around, and quickly spots them amongst a pile of other shoes, hers a familiar manufactured grey amongst the browns of the others. She gets up and leans over to grabs them – oh, that hurts her head – and finds the socks are very helpfully stuffed inside. She starts pulling the first one on whilst wobbling on one leg, before deciding maybe she should lean her hip against the table. Her companion babbles nonsense, and the Doctor glances back at them as she switches to the next sock.

“I’m really sorry, I can’t understand you,” she says. “It’s very strange for me too, believe me. Never not been able to understand someone before. _Well,_ I have, but not in such a _technical_ way. _I’ve_ been misunderstood plenty of times though. Especially on Earth with _this_ face. It’s very frustrating, let me tell you.”

The person says something else.

“Yep,” she winces at the words, pulling on a boot now. “Still not getting it. It actually gives me a bit of a headache, your language. Though actually I think it’s not your language, just the TARDIS translation circuits have gone all scrambled. That’s my ship, the TARDIS. That’s why I need my coat. Find my coat, find my sonic, find my ship. Easy as pie! Although between you and me I’ve always thought pie was pretty tricky to make. Especially the pastry.”

The person says something else, before turning and dashing into the backroom again.

“That’s fine,” the Doctor says, leaning over to do her laces only for her concussion to remind her _exactly_ why that’s a bad idea. She closes her eyes for a minute and groans, before lifting her head up again and sitting down on the floor. She’s still trying to remember how laces even _work_ through her headache when the person comes back again, this time holding a handful of folded clothes.

“No, I need _my_ coat. Not _a_ coat.”

The person continues to hold out the clothes.

“I don’t _need_ those.”

The person steps closer, holding the pile right up to her face.

“Alright _alright,_ ” the Doctor says, taking the pile. There are actually only three items – a dark brown poncho, a pair of beige trousers with patches on the knees and a leather belt. She looks down at her own pair of trousers, considering the scraped holes in them. Hm. Ok, she’d take the trousers, even if they weren’t her normal blue. Decision made, she pulls off her unlaced boot and unclips her suspenders before pulling off her trousers, any issue of modesty not even occurring to her. Her helper makes a sound of alarm, before turning back and going to the other room again. The Doctor ignores them, pulling the new trousers on which end up fitting her surprisingly well. It takes her a few tries to weave the belt through the loops, her fingers unused to such tasks since she only wears one kind of outfit these days. But as soon as she gets it, she’s pulling on her boots again and moving back to the bed, dumping her discarded clothes and grabbing the water canteen. She turns to leave before the person can come back and stop her, only to find that they’re already stood behind her, expectant, bag slung over their shoulder.

She stares at them for a moment.

“Oh,” she says. “Are you coming with me?”

They say a word that _does not_ mean yes, but doesn’t mean no either. In fact, she’s pretty certain it might be the word for _chair_ in Silurian.

She suddenly considers that _maybe_ they were giving her clothes so that she was properly dressed to go out. In which case…

She picks up the poncho and holds it up. The material is rough under her fingers, but not itchy. Strong. Gentle, almost, in a wind-worn way. Like the blankets in the barn that now only lives in her memories.

She can’t help but smile, before she pulls it over her head.

Her new friend leads her out of the shack and through a small settlement which seems to have grown around a cluster of large rocks that hide a spring. All around, small desert plants crowd the sandy soil, and there are even little lizard-like things with two heads scuttling around. The settlement can’t be more than fifty dwellings, and it barely takes them a minute to reach its edges and find themselves in open desert again.

The Doctor had only planned ahead as far as getting out of the shack and finding her coat, with a few steps to improvise in between, but her companion already seems to have a particular destination in mind. They set off with a confident stride, although thanks to their short legs she doesn’t have to work that hard to keep up alongside them.

“I’m the Doctor, by the way,” she says as they go, realising she hasn’t really introduced herself. Her companion looks up with interest at the sound of her voice, ears pricking, but says nothing. Oh yes, right. She points at herself, poking her chest twice. “The Doctor.” She points at them. “What’s your name?”

They cock their head.

“Oh, come on,” she says. “Don’t be shy. I can’t exactly just call you ‘little person’. Or ‘big ears’, but that seems a little offensive and not very helpful since you all have ears like that.”

The person says a word, not something the Doctor recognises as being a particular word from a language she knows. It sounds like ‘zappa’. Hm.

“Zappa?”

They look at her.

“Alright, I’ll go with that.”

They keep going for a quite a while, long enough that the Doctor wonders how on earth Zappa knows where they’re going. To _her_ it pretty much just looks like an awful lot of sand with the odd rock and occasional monument. They must be more markers, warning about the temporal-dimensional disturbances. Zappa never leads them directly into them. The Doctor presumes that their people are the ones who made the monuments, and can’t help but be intrigued by that. As far as she can tell, they don’t _seem_ to be a time sensitive race. Does that mean they just noticed their friends dying – _worse_ than dying – in particular spots and put up warnings? That would make sense. She supposes if they weren’t time sensitive, they wouldn’t feel the way reality was being warped around those points until they hit the epicentre and got caught up in it.

Not long later, their surroundings begin to prick her memories. Rocks jutting out. Hiding places. A steep drop from the ridge, cast in shadow by the sun. _Yes,_ this looks like where she’d seen the Neverweres, albeit from a different angle. Zappa must have realised she wanted to go back here, even with the language barrier. She can’t help but wonder why whoever had found her had been out this far from the settlement. What had they been doing? How had they managed to get her _back_ there?

How had they managed to avoid the Neverweres?

Zappa’s pace suddenly picks up, moving to climb up the rocks leading up to the ridge. The Doctor doesn’t follow, choosing to stay on the lower path down to the bottom of the drop. The shade offers some relief from the incessant heat, although the poncho so far has been cooler than her coat had been. She frowns. Seems like a betrayal to her coat to start thinking things like that.

She starts kicking the sand around, looking for any sign that the contents of her pockets had fallen out. At first, she doesn’t have much luck, which isn’t really a surprise since she’d lost her coat up the top, but she’d half-thought that maybe the Neverweres would have dumped the coat somewhere once they realised they couldn’t eat it. But then, she supposes, the coat of a timetraveller would be a comfort to something like that. A creature that had run out of time. 

It’s then that she comes across a rock sticking out of the sand with a dark stain on it. She stops for a moment, stock still. Moves closer, slowly, before carefully dropping into a crouch. It’s hard to tell exactly what it is, since the rock is dark and purple, but the Doctor knows. She doesn’t remember hitting the ground after she jumped, but her head throbs with a sudden intensity and some instinctive part of her knows this is where she landed. She’s lucky she didn’t kill herself – she can imagine it. Skull cracked open, brains seeping into the sands.

Something catches her eye.

Small, metal. Long.

“Yes!” she says, ignoring her concussion-dizziness to leap over the rock and pull the achingly familiar object out of the sand. _Her sonic._ She presses the button and it lights up, whirring cheerfully. She grins, throwing it up in the air and catching it again. _Yes._ It must have fallen out of her trouser pocket as she’d fallen. Now she just needs to find the coat. There’d been all sort of things in those pockets, like her psychic paper for a start. Of course, those might have fallen out too. She starts looking around, scouring the sand with her eyes.

There’s an alarmed shout from above, and she looks up to see Zappa at the top of the ridge, silhouetted against the sun and pointing, squeaking with alarm. The Doctor turns look, feeling a flash of remembered panic when she sees the approaching form of a Neverwere. She takes a few hurried steps back, only to trip over on the rock she’d hit her heard on last time. She scrambles backwards in the sand, breathing fast. These things had always terrified her, back during the War. At least with Daleks, there are tactics, strategies, _evil plans_ to foil with clever tricks. But Neverweres? There’s no plan. Just instinct, pain and hunger. Time grenades and time mines don’t even _work_ on them, because their timeline is _already_ chewed up and mangled into nothing. The only thing you can do is run and hope they catch the scent of someone else’s timeline –

A rock flies down from above, hitting the Neverwere right in the face.

The Doctor glances up, seeing Zappa up above, another rock ready to throw. They squeak something at her, and even without the words The Doctor figures it probably means ‘ _GO!’._

She pushes herself to her feet and runs, stumbling before she manages to catch her balance. The way to get to the top of the ridge isn’t far, and she scrambles up it, her mind swirling with thoughts. There _is_ a way to stop Neverweres – or, there _will_ be, because she’s _clever, brilliant in a crisis_ and so she’ll figure something out.

What did she do in the Time War?

Run, mostly.

Ok, scratch that.

What resources does she have?

A sonic, her magnificent brain and a rather nice but not that helpful poncho.

She reaches Zappa’s side, crouching beside them. They’ve got a whole collection of rocks, and they’re already throwing the next one with gusto at the lead Neverwere below. But there are others appearing already, twisted forms emerging from behind the rocks, some of them down below, others up there with them. They could try running, but would they even make it back to the settlement? Even if they did, they’d just lead the Neverweres right to it.

She looks around – _think, Doctor, THINK!_

Zappa notices a Neverwere getting closer and squeaks in alarm, throwing another rock. Beside them, their bag lies discarded. Hungry for inspiration, the Doctor reaches for it, pulling it open. She finds it crammed full of _parts,_ the Time War scraps she’s been tripping over since she got here. But these – these are the _good bits,_ the sand mostly shaken out and some of them even look like they might _work._

Her fingers find what seems to be another improvised time grenade, and a thought slips into place, a beautiful, _simple_ plan. Time grenades don’t work on Neverweres because they don’t have any timeline _left._ But she remembers – _yes, she remembers –_

The Neverweres are closing in now, and Zappa pushes her back, panicked. The grenade knocks out of her hand into the sand, but the Doctor scrambles for it even as Zappa grabs her by the corner of her poncho and pulls her away. The Doctor is stronger, though, and dives for it, before jumping away as a Neverwere swipes at her hair.

“ _RUN!_ Just _run!”_ The Doctor yells, getting a shift on herself. Her brain is doing calculations as she goes, and she buzzes the sonic against the grenade. She glances at the results, practically an expert at reading-and-running, before grinning and sonicking the device again, this time with _intent._ She did this once before, in a moment of desperation during the War. The memory comes to her with the frightening clarity she’s grown used to in this place, but this time, _this time,_ she works in reality alongside the images in her mind –

– the Neverweres are all around him, and he’s stuck, _trapped,  
_with nothing more than his sonic and the  
ammunition left by those who  
fell before him.  
His fingers find a grenade  
and his sonic whines against it –

The grenade hums in her hands, activated. She’ll – 

– only have a few seconds before it explodes,  
but a few seconds are all he needs –

She closes her eyes, entrusting her feet to the sand as she focuses, –

– feeling for the timeline embedded in the weapon –

She pinches it between her fingers.

He smooths it out, settling it –

– in an action far too gentle for this moment when –

– his heart is pumping so fast.  
He takes out his sonic again and –

– she _reverses the polarity._

Her eyes snap open. She stops, turns. The desert –

– the battlefield –

– is stretched out before her. The wind ruffles her hair, her familiar witness. Behind her, she hears Zappa’s cry of alarm, but she ignores it. She –

– reaches back his arm –

– and throws the grenade into the advancing Neverweres, the countdown ticking towards oblivion.

“Three –”

“– two _–_ ”

“– _one,”_ she whispers under her breath.

The grenade erupts, the timeline embedded within exploding outwards with violent intensity. The resulting shockwave knocks the Doctor off her feet, temporal shrapnel raining down. A few pieces nick her timeline, and immediately foreign images flash through her mind like ghosts – _music in the streets of the Citadel, mountains glistening beyond the glass dome; sparks raining down from the ceiling as the ship shakes under enemy fire; stepping out of TARDIS doors and onto new, strange soil; yellow sand running through fingers_ –

The Neverweres fall back from the explosion with animalistic screams, their food source suddenly weaponised and made poisonous to them. The leaders, who had been closest, lie motionless in the sand.

A hand appears on her shoulder, and she flinches backwards, blinking. It’s Zappa, who is babbling with fear and probably has been for the last few minutes.

Right.

“Yeah yep alright, let’s get on with it,” she says, pushing herself to her feet and ignoring the way her head is spinning as they start running again. But it’s fine. It’s _worth it,_ even. She’ll wince her way through a billion headaches if it means getting her sonic back.

She grips the device in her hand, a feeling of triumph flooding her.

Step one, complete.

Step two – the _TARDIS._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO MUCH for reading, hope you enjoyed! I'll be posting chapter 2....soon....
> 
> [Here's some sketches](https://picnokinesis.tumblr.com/post/616774778003570688/im-just-about-to-post-the-poncho-fic-aka-in-the) if you want to see what Zappa looks like!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone: taka, have you heard of ‘normal chapter lengths’?  
> Me: no??? who is she?? does she like doctor who??
> 
> Although actually this is the shortest chapter, I think! (at about...9k ahah) Also, I've decided to split chapter 3 into two chapters because it was literally about half the fic, and I found a good point at which to cut it. Whee!
> 
> Ponchos!!!

Despite how much the Doctor _wants to,_ they don’t end up looking for the TARDIS straight away. She attempts to protest, to try and direct Zappa to go back the way they came, find a way _around_ the Neverweres and get back to her ship. It can’t be _far_ from there, and by now she’s _pretty sure_ twenty-four hours would have passed and the ship would be awake again. But the close shave with the Neverweres seems to mean _end of adventure_ for Zappa, and nothing the Doctor says or does will make the little alien turn around. And the Doctor doesn’t know how to get back to the settlement without them.

At first, it confuses her. Zappa had seemed pretty… _plucky,_ back there, ready to throw rocks as soon as the lead Neverwere had appeared. They’d clearly known what it was and that it was dangerous, which makes the Doctor think that they’d encountered them before. And their first reaction hadn’t been to _run away,_ but to fight back, probably until the Neverweres went away. But then they’d been quickly overwhelmed, hadn’t they? That had probably been _her_ fault. A timetraveller, her presence like blood in the water. Her timeline is a convoluted, complicated tangle compared to the timeline of a linear creature like Zappa. And, thanks to her coat, the Neverweres already had her scent. The pack of them had all been drawn in, ravenous. In previous encounters, Zappa had probably only had to scare away one or two, before carrying on what they were doing.

And what _had_ they been doing? Zappa’s bag had been left behind in their panicked escape, but the Doctor had gotten a good look at the contents. Did Zappa come out here and collect parts? Is that why she’d been found, lying unconscious in the sand? And what did they use the parts _for_ once they’d got them?

“Are you an engineer, Zappa?” she asks, even though she knows her companion won’t understand. “An inventor? You’re curious, aren’t you? That’s why you come out here on your own. You find things and take them back… _dangerous_ things…” She considers this for a moment. There’d been a _time grenade_ in those parts, and there were temporal weapons scattered all over this desert. “Do you even know what they are? What do you _do_ with them once you have them?”

Zappa looks at her. Says something, their words twisting more pain into her headache. The Doctor grimaces, then sighs.

She’ll have to do some investigating.

It feels like it takes less time to get back to the settlement than it did to get out to the Neverwere ridge, but in this place the Doctor can’t completely trust how it _feels._ She wishes Graham were here – he’d have a watch. Or Ryan, with his phone. At least that way she’d be able to _know,_ to see the seconds ticking by. It’s almost endearing how humans talk about trying to _keep time_ , as if time is even something that _can_ be kept. But, she supposes, when time isn’t something you can _feel_ or _see_ like she can, you would create something like a clock. Something that _ticks_ to remind you that reality is constantly moving, constantly rushing forwards.

Zappa leads them back to the shack, and then immediately scuttles off into the back room. The Doctor feels like she should _probably_ sit down on the bed for a minute with the way her head is screaming at her, but she pushes the thought aside, electing to investigate the room instead. She’s drawn to the sketches pinned on the walls, fingers carefully brushing over the paper. The drawings are very _precise,_ even though the artist had clearly used a soft sort of charcoal. Technical sketches – yes, that’s _exactly_ what they seem to be. She peers closer at one – it looks like part of a chameleon circuit, the inside sketched out in great detail. And another seems to be most of a force field prism. And this one – part of a Dalek construction unit. Whoever did them must have taken each item apart and carefully sketched each piece, before presumably reconstructing it to draw the object as a whole. It’s _impressive._ Very impressive, especially considering the rather _basic_ surroundings she finds herself in. This is –

There’s a rustle to her right, and she turns to see Zappa standing in the doorframe, ears pressed nervously against the material wrapped around their head.

“This is all you, isn’t it?” the Doctor asks, unable to hide her smile. “Zappa, this is brilliant! _You’re_ brilliant!”

Zappa’s ears perk up. The Doctor’s smile widens into a grin, memories bubbling up in her mind, but this time much more pleasant – and more recent. Nikola Tesla, leaning across the counter opposite her with a look of delight in his eyes.

_“You’re an inventor?”_

Zappa reminds her of him. She bets they would have gotten on quite well, if only they shared a language.

The memories of Tesla make her pull her sonic out of her pocket, holding it out for Zappa to see. The little alien comes closer, admiring it with interest, but not taking it out of the Doctor’s hand. The Doctor presses the button to show them how it works, and the tip whirrs into life. Immediately, one of the ornaments hanging from the wall – which looks like part of a Dalek casing – falls to the floor with a clatter. Zappa starts with alarm.

“Oops! Sorry!” That’s the problem with point-and-think – if you point and _don’t_ think, anything could happen. At least nothing exploded this time.

Zappa turns to rearrange the ornament, and the Doctor uses the opportunity to peer into the backroom. The first part appears to be some kind of workshop, tools and brushes hanging from string above a workbench. The room then curves round, leading to an outer door which currently stands open. Curious, the Doctor moves through the doorway and into the small space, ducking under a woven shirt that’s drying on a line until she gets to the back entrance. She finds a small, roofed cooking area, where Zappa’s taller housemate is busy frying… _something_ in a pan-like object. At the sight of the Doctor, the alien complains loudly, words like splinters in her brain as they wave her away.

“Alright alright!” she says, ducking back. “What is it with this face and kitchens? Do I look like I’m going to set something on fire?”

To be fair, the answer is probably a resounding _yes._

She returns to the front room to find Zappa pouring a little water from the canteen onto the succulents near where the ornament had fallen. They turn and glance at her, before saying something short and pointing at the bed firmly.

The Doctor screws up her face.

“I’m fine, not tired,” she says.

Zappa screws the lid of the canteen back on before giving her a distinctly unimpressed look.

“I’m _fine!_ Why does no one believe me when I say that? It was just a bump on the head, I’ve dealt with much worse before!”

Zappa’s gaze is unwavering. For a minute, the Doctor almost feels like the alien _can_ understand what she’s saying. But of course, they can’t.

Zappa seems to take the Doctor’s lack of response as further argument, and reaches forward, grabbing the corner of her poncho and dragging her in the direction of the bed. _Technically_ , she could fight it, but honestly, she doesn’t have the heart. Zappa is only trying to look after her. And besides, maybe if Zappa _thinks_ she’s resting, they’ll leave her alone and then she can get up again and start figuring out how far her TARDIS might be.

 _Yes,_ that’s what she’ll do! Plan decided, she sits herself down on the bed, letting Zappa push her gently so that she’s lying. The alien pats her forehead in that affectionate way that the Doctor is starting to think might be _cultural_ , before moving away to attend to the other plants in the room. The Doctor shifts slightly, making like she’s getting comfortable, before closing her eyes. She wants to be convincing, of course. Although, having her eyes closed is quite _nice,_ actually. Between that and lying down, her head begins to feel like something approaching normal. Maybe she’ll just lie here for a minute before she enacts her escape plan. Yeah…that’s what she’ll do…just for a minute…

The TARDIS console room is bright white. She moves around, adjusting leavers, her hand running along the edges of the console affectionately. The TARDIS whirrs happily in response, and she smiles, sighing. Yes. This is right, isn’t it? Sometimes she can feel so lost – so alone in the universe, the only one like her, a renegade of her own making. But like this, alone with her ship brushing against the edges of her mind, engines humming and whining in that beautiful song, she feels _right._ Aligned with the universe. At peace, almost.

There’s a shift, and the engines stop, settling. The doors swing open of their own accord. She moves towards the entrance, looking out. _Oh._ Somewhere she’s never been before? She steps out and onto new, strange soil, glancing around with wide eyes. _Yes_ , this is always the part she loves – her feet treading new ground, her lungs breathing new air. She would stop and just appreciate it, stand there and take it all in – but she can’t. She has a job to do. She signs, before reaching into her pocket, pulling a notebook out and flicking it open. But the pages are empty. All of them. And her hands, ebony tones and war-worn –

Those aren’t her hands.

She turns back, disturbed, looking for the familiar shape of her TARDIS, but she only sees trees. Trees and trees and trees and –

She turns, and there is desert before her.

She stumbles, shielding her eyes from the sand that rides in the wind. How did she get here? She must have fallen through, which means her TARDIS must have crashed somewhere. It couldn’t be far, she’s certain of it. Poor thing. It must have been terrified – she’d felt it as they’d tumbled through the chaos. She’d had it for a while now, and had started to let herself grow attached to it – her first TARDIS had been lost, left behind in the middle of a battlefield. She tries to tell herself it doesn’t mean anything – TARDISes are simply tools, a means to an end.

But doesn’t it hurt so much when they scream?

“It does,” comes a voice, and she turns. Behind her stands a figure in a checkered waistcoat and trousers, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He crouches, picking up a handful of yellow sand and watching as the wind snags it from the gaps between his fingers. “We both know it does. We’ve _heard them,_ haven’t we? Billions of them, sleeping in their beds before the fire came and they _crumbled…_ to _ashes._ ”

He curls his hand into a fist, staring at it, before his gaze snaps to her face. He pushes himself up, coming right up to her, their noses almost touching. His expression is twisted into a snarl, feral and full of rage.

“ _Ashes,_ Doctor,” he spits, and she frowns, disorientated. Is she the Doctor? Yes. _Yes, of course she is_ – she is the Doctor and he is the Master, and this is their game. This has _always_ been their game. And he is two steps ahead, gripping forbidden knowledge so tightly in his hands so she can’t even catch a glimpse, even though it’s _burning_ against his skin.

“What did you _find?_ ” she asks, desperate, begging.

He grins, emotions flipping on a dime. “Not telling.”

Anger chokes her throat. She grabs him by the collar. _“Tell me what you FOUND!”_

He _laughs,_ wild and disturbed, and he goes on so long that it makes her ears ring, buzzing with static. She lets go of him, pushing him away. It’s only then that she realises it’s no longer laughter – it’s a scream.

He stumbles back, the wind suddenly picking up. Dust billows around them, thick and burning, and she watches as he staggers, falling backwards into the cloud. She can’t see him. Panicked, she runs forwards, buffeted by the gale, but she can’t find him, all she can find is dust and smoke and bodies and _fire and –_

She gasps, sitting up in her bed and breathing heavily. Her heartbeats thunder a frantic ostinato in her chest.

A nightmare. Just a nightmare. The room around her is dimmer, sunset rolling around – but not dark yet. There’s no-one else there.

She sighs, falling back onto the bed and resting her hand over her eyes, headache blooming once again.

 _And they all wonder_ , she thinks, _why I won’t sleep._

She spends the night with her hands fisted into her poncho, trying to imagine that she’s somewhere else as time twists and rolls like the deck of a ship. Somewhere like Graham’s sofa, holding onto that blanket he’d draped over her the night after Grace had died when she was still hanging around like a stray cat. But all her brain will give her is the memory of the barn. It’ll be gone now – nothing more than cinders. Dust in the wind. The fabric under her hands is like the corduroy blanket she’d once clutched with small, terrified hands.

“There’s nothing in the dark,” she breathes, a mantra, “that’s not there in the light.”

But that had never comforted her, had it?

There were monstrous things in the light too, after all.

She’s bleary eyed and insomnia-weary when the sun rises, rays beginning to peek through the wooden slats. Zappa makes an appearance not long later, shuffling around quietly. The Doctor pushes herself up, bored of lying in bed and failing to sleep, and Zappa immediately pulls her outside to the kitchen area. They eat breakfast together, which turns out to be fried chunks of something that might be lizard meat, and something else that might be roots. It’s not the most tasteful meal she’s ever had, but it’s not bad. A solid 3.5 stars on Space Yelp. What would she call this restaurant? _Remote Shack on Backwater Planet._ Hm. No, that doesn’t really have a good ring to it, even if it’s accurate.

As soon as breakfast is done, Zappa starts working on something at their workbench. Despite the Doctor’s desperation to get out and find her TARDIS (and her _coat,_ she still wants that one back), she can’t help but be fascinated by her new friend’s work. The little alien is taking great pains to carefully pull apart a limbo atrophier – something that is _quite_ a dangerous TARDIS defence mechanism, now she thinks about it. Not something she has in _her_ TARDIS, but all the Type 65s and the Battle TARDISes had them – something to freeze intruders and shift them into a dimensional stasis field. Quite nasty, potentially, if it malfunctioned. Half of you might end up in one dimension and half in another.

The one Zappa is brushing _sand_ out of, however, seems like it’s dead. So _hopefully_ nothing should go wrong.

The Doctor starts getting restless quite quickly after that, but luckily assistance comes in the form of yesterday’s incident. Zappa begins rooting around for something, clearly frustrated, and it doesn’t take long for the Doctor to realise what’s happened. There’s a tool missing. And, mostly likely, it had been in their bag, left behind at the Neverwere ridge. By the time Zappa is ready to leave, the Doctor has hastily pulled her boots on and is standing by the door, not willing to lose this opportunity to go out into the desert again with a guide.

She _could_ go alone, but there’s only so far her time sense can get her with avoiding temporal anomalies, and even though she’s been known to be an idiot at times, she realises that would probably be a _bad_ idea, concussed as she is.

They take the same route as they did the previous day, although this time the Doctor scans with the sonic as she goes, wondering if maybe she could _map out_ the disturbances. Or if maybe Zappa or one of their people already have some kind of map _._ It would make sense if they made the markers. And then perhaps the Doctor could combine that with readings from the sonic – yes, then she’d be able to determine the presence of the strongest anomalies, differentiate the temporal ones from the dimensional ones…

But how will she ask for a map? She huffs. Maybe she’ll just have to go looking. It’s a bit rude, but worth it in the end. They’d understand, she’s sure. They seem like very reasonable people.

She wants to ask them about the _other_ thing, the undercurrent to this whole situation that continues to fuel her anxiety, especially when she’s not with her TARDIS. Who _brought_ her here? What do they _want?_ And where _are they,_ hidden out in the sand? The idea that they might have found the TARDIS while she was gone…Rassilon, she doesn’t even know how long she was _unconscious_ for, at the bottom of that ridge. She doesn’t think it was _days,_ and yet…

As soon as they arrive, it doesn’t take them long to find Zappa’s bag – but then to the Doctor’s surprise, Zappa doesn’t even try to turn and go back. Instead, they just keep moving quickly through the path between the rocks, not even looking back to see if the Doctor is following. She blinks, confused – she thought she’d _at least_ have to try and persuade them. But she’s not one to look a gift fish in the mouth or whatever the human saying is, and so she dashes after them, scanning again with her sonic. They’re close enough to where the TARDIS is now that maybe, _maybe –_

“Yes!” she exclaims as the sonic bleeps with confirmation picking up the TARDIS’ location. At her outburst, Zappa whacks her pointedly, and the Doctor winces.

“Right, yes, sorry!” she mutters. “Very quiet. Don’t spook the Neverweres.”

They make quick work of leaving the ridge behind them, and very soon they’re traipsing over open sand again. This time, the Doctor leads the way, her stride confident as she follows the data from her sonic. Zappa occasionally stops as they go, very good at spotting buried items that the Doctor misses, and digs them out to stuff in their bag before running to catch up. As always, time stutters and lurches, blurring into a meaningless haze in the heat. But finally, _finally,_ they come around a familiar looking row of rocks and see the cliff stretched out in front of them. The brilliant blue of the TARDIS sticks out like a sore thumb, and the Doctor feels like she might cry at the sight of it.

 _“Yes…_ ” she breathes, memories of previous reunions with her precious box flashing vibrantly behind her eyes, but she ignores them, already running towards the ship. Zappa says something that sounds like it could be _that weird thing is what you were looking for?,_ but they come running along as well, falling behind the Doctor’s longer stride. She should possibly stop to wait, but she can’t bear to. She’s so close, she can practically _feel_ the TARDIS reaching out, a psychic yearning for her renegade. Her thief.

She arrives in front of the doors, images flashing through her mind – different versions of her hand, _every_ version of her hand, reaching to touch their TARDIS door in synch with her. Her fingertips meet the wood, and the ship hums at the contact – a sigh of relief.

The Doctor closes her eyes, pressing her forehead against the doors. The TARDIS fills her mind, like clear water pouring over wounds. It glistens, soothing. For the first time in days, she feels like she can breathe. An image is pushed into her mind, her boat returning to her over the sea. The constellations of Gallifrey, framed by the red grass she’d once lain in.

_Home._

“I’m back, old girl,” she murmurs. “Thanks for waiting.”

There’s another hum, and the door clicks open for her. Of course, her key is on the growing list of things lost with her coat.

She steps inside, cool air immediately embracing her. She smiles, taking a moment to appreciate the sight of the columns glowing orange, alive with light. Then she moves over to the console, pressing a few buttons before jamming the sonic into a port, transferring the data she collected. There’s an electronic bloop, and Gallifreyan swirls onto the view screen. She pulls it over to her, glancing over the display for a moment before swiping the view to the side so she can run a diagnostic at the same time.

She needs to know what exactly what’s damaged.

The doors creak, and the Doctor looks up to see Zappa appear in the doorway. The alien stops for a moment, eyes wide, before they dash out, probably to do the typical circuit of the exterior. The Doctor can’t help but grin, and the TARDIS gives her an admonishing burble.

“What?” she says, indignant. “Don’t pretend it’s not your favourite part too.”

Zappa returns after a few seconds, stepping into the TARDIS fully and staring around in wonder. They say something, and the Doctor laughs to herself as she moves around the console.

“That had better been _it’s bigger on the inside_ or something along those lines!” she says.

Zappa says something else, moving up to the console and reaching out.

“Ah ah!” The Doctor says, lunging to grab Zappa’s wrist before they can actually press something. Thankfully, the fabric wrapped over their skin means the psychic bleedover is minimal, but she does catch a sense of wonder mingled with guilt. She lets go.

“That’s the Warp Ellipse Cutout Circuit toggle,” she explains, knowing that even if Zappa could understand it would probably mean very little to them. “Need that left on.”

Zappa blinks at her.

“Yep,” she grins, before pointing at another button. “You can go crazy with that one though! That’s the mood lighting. I think.”

She presses it experimentally, and something makes a loud _bang_ from somewhere in the depths of the ship. The TARDIS complains at her.

“Alright alright! Not mood lighting. Got it. You’d think people would label things, wouldn’t you?”

The TARDIS whorps.

“Well why did they go putting them in the manual? _No-one_ reads that thing. ‘Cept the Rani, but she’s just like that.”

There’s a bleep, and the Doctor grabs the screen, pulling it over to her new position. Diagnostic complete. Brilliant. She starts scanning through the results. Ah. A lot of things broken. That’s less brilliant.

She squints at the readings, examining them. The TARDIS is detecting some kind of signal that looks like it’s _interfering_ with the systems – and it doesn’t seem to be the temporal and dimensional anomalies, although the TARDIS _also_ isn’t happy about those. No, she’s not quite sure what it is, but it’s messing with the guidance systems enough to mean she doesn’t think she’d be able to take off. A chill ripples across her skin, and she thinks of how they crashed. How something _dragged_ them here.

Whatever it was, it’s still having an effect.

Zappa says something, and the Doctor frowns, new train of thought blossoming. She starts looking for the translation circuit. It doesn’t take her long to find, and according to the diagnostic, it’s one of the few things that _isn’t_ broken. She frowns, looking at Zappa.

“Either my head really _has_ gone wonky,” she says. “Or your language is _very weird indeed._ ”

Zappa frowns, ears twitching.

The Doctor hums. “Or maybe the diagnostic equipment was damaged too…”

She ends up checking the both the translation circuit and the diagnostic systems manually – which, irritatingly, appears to be perfectly fine – before she gives up and starts to work on the more urgent things. First, she tries messing with the signal, which she doesn’t get far with, before getting distracted with the large number of repairs she needs to deal with. There are a _lot_ of things damaged – a lot of parts that she needs but doesn’t have. She ends up wrist deep in cables, pulling out damaged parts and rambling to Zappa about how she wishes she had a spare interstital antenna right about now, since the current one has snapped rather spectacularly into two and the absolute tesseractulator is going to go completely bonkers if she tries to travel without it, which _won’t_ end well for anyone. Zappa seems quite content to _watch_ her for a while, even if the words mean nothing to them, and frequently picks up parts to examine after the Doctor discards them. After what she _guesses_ is a few hours, however, Zappa heads out of the TARDIS, leaving their bag behind as a gesture of _I’m coming back._ The Doctor continues working, unperturbed, even as her companion wanders in and out, bringing back parts that are still leaking sand and comparing them to the parts on the console room floor. The Doctor winces at that, knowing her ship will sulk for _weeks_ if any sand gets in her circuits, but there isn’t really a way she can communicate that to the other.

Or, at least, that’s what she _thinks_ , until Zappa returns into the TARDIS once more and stands next to her, holding out an intact interstital antenna. The Doctor stares at it for a moment, utterly bewildered. A flicker of excitement flashes through her. Maybe they just saw the broken one in the pile – but, maybe, _maybe –_

She thinks of Zappa not turning around earlier, knowing she wanted to look for the TARDIS. She remembers how they’d taken her back to the Neverwere ridge when she’d been rambling about her lost coat.

“ _Zappa,_ ” she says, looking them right in the eyes. “Can you _understand me?”_

Zappa says something, but of course the Doctor doesn’t understand it. She bites back a growl of frustration, pulling herself out of the machinery and crouching next to Zappa properly.

“I can’t understand _you,_ and honestly your language makes my head hurt rather a lot, so _non-verbal communication!_ This means ‘yes’ –” she gives Zappa a thumbs up – “and this means ‘no’ –” a thumbs down. “Did you understand that?”

Zappa looks at their hands for a moment, before curling their fist into a thumbs up and holding it out at her. The Doctor grins.

“Yes! Oh, that’s brilliant! Have you been able to understand me the whole time?” Maybe it’s just because Zappa came in the TARDIS, the translation circuits kicking in –

Zappa gives her a thumbs up.

Hm, ok. Not that then. She considers this for a moment, various theories sparking in her mind but she discards them quickly, none of them measuring up. She looks at Zappa again. “Do all of you understand me? All of your people?”

Thumbs down.

“Then how come _you_ can?” she frowns. Zappa says something – and the Doctor can’t help but feel frustrated that _Zappa_ is the one who understands everything in this conversation rather than _her_. She’s not used to that. She doesn’t like it. But Zappa’s tone sounds uncertain…so maybe the alien just doesn’t know.

Hm. She scans Zappa with her sonic, and they flinch, but then stays still. The Doctor whips the instrument back to look at the readings, and her frown only deepens at the results.

“What?” she mutters. “That makes no sense…”

Zappa makes a worried noise.

The Doctor looks back at them. “I think…I need to take a look at the rest of your people.” She pauses, remembering the scattered mess around her and the antennae Zappa had retrieved. “Maybe after I’ve sorted some of this out.”

Zappa gives her a thumbs up. The Doctor smiles, returning the gesture, even as her unease grows, the readings on the sonic filling her thoughts.

Zappa is, somehow, in an abnormal quantum state.

According to the sonic, they shouldn’t even _exist._

It turns out, after they’ve returned to the settlement and the Doctor has harassed every individual she can find, that all of Zappa’s people are the same. Quantum entangled, somehow, existing and not existing at the same time. The whole village is like a small pocket society with no history, their culture and citizens just popping out of nowhere. The Doctor tries to ask Zappa how long the village has been there, by the spring, and she gets the sense that they just _appeared_ one day. Like they’d always been there. Just some backwater people who shouldn’t exist, with a language made up of every other language and the meaning taken out, on a planet full of rips in time. Culture with no roots.

At least the ponchos are very nice.

It doesn’t explain how Zappa can understand her when no-one else can. But _because_ they can, she’s able to ask _questions,_ which brings her a step closer to figuring this whole thing out. It turns out there _is_ a map of the monuments, which the Doctor pours over for a good few minutes. And if the Doctor draws any of the parts she knows she’ll need to fix the TARDIS, half the time Zappa can produce at least a _piece_ of it.

And then, of course, comes the most important question of all.

“Is there someone else here, Zappa?” she asks, sitting on a stool by the doorframe whilst Zappa brushes sand out of a compartment. “Someone with technology? Because something brought my ship down – it made me crash here and it’s keeping the TARDIS stuck, and I need to know _why._ ”

Zappa stops brushing for a moment, like they’re considering something. Then they put their tools down and start getting ready to go out.

 _Does that mean yes?_ the Doctor wonders, anticipation building in her chest. If Zappa _knows_ where they are –

She follows them as they leave the shack, heading out of the settlement in a different direction to the one they’d been in before. They end up travelling through a small canyon, similar to the one she found the time mine in, before Zappa starts leading her up a steep, rocky slope. She clambers after them, wondering how far up they’re going. The path they’re taking seems worn down – well-trodden. How many times has Zappa been up here before?

A few moments later, the path flattens out into a ledge that leads around the edge of the mesa they’re climbing on, and curves around until they’re no longer in the canyon, but looking out above open sand. The Doctor almost stumbles, shielding her eyes against the light of the sun with one hand whilst the other clings to the rockface. Her breath hitches in her throat at the sight laid out before her.

There’s a structure, standing tall in the sand.

It looks like an enormous _cathedral._

No, that’s not quite right – it looks like the _ruins_ of a cathedral, a structural corpse, bones worn down by the wind. It’s quite far out, but it’s _huge,_ casting a deep shadow as the sun begins its to fall from its afternoon arc. The Doctor stares at it for a moment, mind swirling with thoughts. Is this another place like Zappa’s settlement – a place that just appeared out of nowhere, that shouldn’t even exist? No, she doesn’t think so. Even this far away, there’s something _different_ about it. Like it’s always been there, alone in the desert. Like it could never be anywhere else.

She frowns, glancing at Zappa. “There’s technology there?”

Zappa is already looking at her and gives her a thumbs up. The Doctor’s frown deepens, and she looks outwards again. The building itself looks old, and she can’t _see_ anything technological between the most ruined sections – but there are parts of the structure that are still intact. There must be something hidden in there. And, hopefully, whoever is controlling it is there too.

A determined smirk tugs at the corner of her mouth. The intense desire to investigate it almost overwhelms her. “Take me down there,” she says, looking at Zappa, who looks suddenly apprehensive. “I need to see what’s inside.”

Zappa gives her a very firm _thumbs down._

“ _What?_ Why – you’ve been there before haven’t you?”

A sheepish thumbs up.

“Then why not!?

Zappa makes a frustrated sound, before gently pushing the Doctor’s arm, herding her back down the ledge. The Doctor plants her feet and refuses to move.

“ _Zappa,_ I need to go down there! There’s got to be a way if you went there before!”

Her guide gives her a firmer shove. The Doctor relents before she ends up falling off the _second_ cliff this week, and turns to start heading back the way they came, frustration brewing in her chest. _So close,_ and yet so far. But Zappa’s reluctance won’t stop her, she decides already. There’s got to be a way around this mesa – maybe through another part of the canyon. Zappa had _clearly_ been down there before – or, if not Zappa, someone else from their settlement, but the Doctor thinks the former is more likely. Of all of them, Zappa seems the most adventurous. The most curious. The most likely one to explore a ruined cathedral out in the desert.

The most like her.

She waits until they’re down from the rockface before she turns, stopping. Zappa stops just in front of her, and gives her another adamant thumbs down before she can even get a word in. The Doctor sighs.

“ _Zappa!_ What is it? What’s down there that you don’t want me to see?!”

Zappa makes an indignant noise, and the Doctor bites her lip, chiding herself. _Be kind._ It’s more likely that Zappa is _afraid_ of the place and trying to keep her safe, not hiding something from her. She puts her hands up.

“Alright, alright, sorry. It’s just – is it dangerous? Scary? Got a bad vibe?”

Thumbs up. Their eyes shine with anxiety.

“Well that’s basically my speciality,” she tells them, aiming for encouraging. “Dangerous things _are_ my thing. I’m great in a tight spot. You saw me the other day! I think on my feet.”

Zappa gives her a look that seems to say _I found you lying unconscious under a ridge because the plan you came up with was to jump off a cliff._

The Doctor continues, a little put out. “I _fix_ things. I’m the _Doctor,_ that’s what I _do._ So trust me, Zappa, when I say I can manage whatever’s down there. I can sort it. I can make it so it’s not dangerous anymore. I just need you to show me how to get there.”

Zappa looks at her for a moment.

“ _Please,_ ” she says, feeling a little desperate now. “I need to.”

The alien glances away, before looking back at her. Their eyes seem incredibly _sorry._

They put their thumb down. Then, before she can say anything else, they push past her, heading back down the canyon and towards the settlement. The Doctor watches their back for a moment, before turning, trying to figure out the best way to start in getting to the other side of the mesa. There’s a passage that branches off from a fork, and she heads towards it, feeling optimistic. She doesn’t take more than a few steps in that direction before she hears a shout, and turns to find Zappa running back towards her. She groans, already moving away again.

“I’m going!” she says, but Zappa has caught up and is grabbing onto the corner of her poncho and pulling her back, making distressed noises. She winces at the words, and stops, sighing.

“Alright, fine! I won’t go.”

Zappa doesn’t seem to believe her, clearly thinking she’s given up too easy. They’re not wrong – the Doctor has every intention of pegging it when the alien isn’t looking, but Zappa keeps a firm hold of the fabric and begins walking back again, this time pulling the Doctor along with them.

“This _really_ isn’t necessary –” she tries, but Zappa just gives her a distinctly grumpy thumbs down with their free hand. The Doctor huffs, getting the message.

It’s fine.

She’ll just go when Zappa isn’t looking.

Unfortunately, Zappa doesn’t give her the chance. They stop off back at the shack for a moment, Zappa clearly instructing their housemate to keep a close eye on the Doctor whilst they grab a few things, before they lead the Doctor back out into the desert again, this time in the direction of the TARDIS. And it’s not like the Doctor _doesn’t_ have lots of repairs she needs to make, but right now all she can think about is the ruin. If the whatever-it-is is there, sending out some kind of signal that’s bewildering her TARDIS, she can make as many repairs as she likes and it still won’t _change_ anything. The TARDIS still won’t take off and she’ll still be stranded in the middle of nowhere –

Unless she can block the signal somehow.

She considers this, turning the thought over in her mind. It could be possible…she still wants to _know_ who is responsible and _why,_ something inside her desperately pulling her _back_ to that place _,_ but maybe she could find a way to block it. That way the TARDIS would work and she could use it, get as close as she likes to the cathedral before _anyone_ could stop her, especially not stubborn little aliens.

 _Yes._ She likes that idea.

The journey to the TARDIS feels faster than it did that morning, and she’s not sure if it’s because she’s got a new plan in mind or because the planet is messing with her time sense. Zappa also stops less, like they’re expecting her to turn around and run back to the ruin the second they’re not looking. It’s _irritating_ , but also…intriguing. Whatever’s in that place clearly has Zappa terrified.

Once they arrive, she starts focusing on getting the key systems up and running so they’re in a state that’s at least functional for a short spatial hop, since she doesn’t need to actually travel in time at the moment. It’s not perfect, a patch job, but the moment she’s done with it she starts working on the signal. It’s still there, in the background of all the scans she runs. But _what_ is it? It’s _strong,_ strong enough to affect the TARDIS, even though there must be miles of sand stretched out between her ship and the ruin. She can’t even tell what kind of signal it is – it’s like it’s obscured from both her and the TARDIS identification circuits. Someone doesn’t want her to see what it is. Which, of course, only makes her want to know what it is _more –_ and also makes it very difficult to figure out a way to block it. She spends far longer than she likes trying to fiddle with theories, twisting dials and fine-tuning workarounds. The light through the TARDIS doors is beginning to fade to red, and Zappa starts to hover, looking like they think they should _really be heading back now_ , but the Doctor is close – _so close_ she can feel it.

“I know,” she says to Zappa, “I know, I just – give me five minutes. No, actually 2 minutes. 1 minute and 39 seconds, and we won’t even have to walk back.” She can feel the alien’s confusion as she starts tapping away at buttons on the console, putting the finishing touches into place. Exactly 1 minute and _38_ seconds later, the block activates, and she watches as the signal ramps down on her screen – not _completely_ gone, but diminished. In the back of her mind, she feels the sense of unease from the TARDIS that has been humming ever since she started messing with the signal, but she ignores it, determined.

This will work. She _needs_ it to work.

She yanks her hand down on the initiator lever, and the engines engage, whining in a way that _doesn’t_ sound healthy. The ship begins to shake, the cloister bell tolling, and the crystal pillars flash to red in warning. Zappa looks around, alarmed, but the Doctor grits her teeth, darting around the console as she makes adjustments on the fly, trying to override failsafe systems that are kicking in. It’s not until the TARDIS decides to shut down the engines itself and shoves a psychic _refusal_ into the Doctor’s mind, combined with a sharp electric shock from the console, that she finally stops.

“ _What?!_ ” she snaps at her ship, trying to run another diagnostic. “That should have _worked –_ it’s just a little hop, it’s _fine!”_

The TARDIS whorps angrily back at her, before shutting the screen off. The Doctor yells in frustration.

“What is _wrong_ with you?!”

But all she gets is the psychic equivalent of shutters slamming down between them. She staggers back in shock, bewildered.

The TARDIS has _never_ done that before.

“What…” she breathes, blinking in confusion. Her thoughts are swirling dizzyingly behind her eyes, and she stands and stares for a long moment before Zappa tugs on her poncho, pointing outside at the growing darkness.

The Doctor looks out of the door for a moment, before nodding dumbly and letting Zappa lead her out into the sand. She pauses for a moment when she reaches the doorway, looking back into the console room which is now dim and blue – but this time, she has no idea if the TARDIS is reflecting her own sadness or revealing its own.

She rests her hand on the wood of the door briefly, before closing it and wandering out into the evening light.

She can’t sleep.

Memories of the TARDIS blocking her out bubble up far too easily in this place, like angry gas under a volcanic lake, and no sooner has she pushed them back down than her thoughts are torqued to the ruin out in the sand. Waiting. _Yearning._ Is she yearning for it, or the other way around? She tosses and turns, blanket twisting between her legs. She’s not sure. She can’t tell.

She needs to leave.

It had been fine in the daylight with reality to distract her, but now the shadows are draped over every surface and there’s nothing for her to cling onto. Time is slippery and the dark is everywhere, and her thoughts are spiralling down into one clear focus that she can’t shake.

Could she find it, on her own in the darkness?

She wants to try.

She needs to try.

She should wait. She _really_ should wait, until first light at least. But the desperation to go and _look_ is growing stronger, inescapable. Now. She needs to be there now. She needed to be there _yesterday._

The other occupants of the shack are asleep in a room she hasn’t wandered into yet. It’s silent, except for the wind. The wind is _always_ there, whispering in the night – urging her on.

 _Run,_ it whispers, _run, Doctor. Run and find out. Run and save the day. Run and never look back._

She sits up, the blanket slipping off her shoulders. She hesitates for a moment, clinging to the thin mattress as she looks out into the gloom of the room.

“There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there in the light,” she mutters under her breath, willing herself to be brave. In the end, it’s more her _need_ to go than any kind of courage that overcomes her fear, and she cautiously swings her legs off the bed. A memory jutters in and out, jagged –

– a hand clapsing his ankle,  
his breath hitching in fear.  
There is _something under the bed –  
  
_

– but she shudders through it, slipping her socked feet into her boots. The temporal burn on her ankle prickles painfully, but nothing reaches out to grab her from the darkness, and so she pushes herself up silently. She crosses to the stool by the table, finding the dark shape piled upon it in that matches the feel of her poncho, and pulls the fabric over her head. Then she moves to the door, hesitating for a moment, listening to the wind. It whistles a song, beckoning.

_Run, Doctor. Come to us._

She closes her eyes, pushes open the door and steps out into the night. Immediately, a gust nearly knocks her over, the wind stronger than she’d realised. But it’s pushing her in the direction of the canyon, and so she goes, trudging out of the settlement as the sand whips around her. The sky is clear, two moons hanging above her and covering the landscape in silvery, reflected light. It’s just enough to see by. She looks up briefly at the sky that is crowded with constellations in the lack of light pollution. The backdrop is blue, like Earth, although she’d only seen skies crammed like this when she’d lived in the outback. But on Gallifrey there’d been skies like this all the time, stars scattered across deep orange.

The memory of it hurts, suddenly, like a knife in her chest, twisting. That sky is still out there in panorama above her home planet, but now the red grass is burnt to dust and the Citadel stands in ruins, her oldest friend holding the match –

She shoves the thoughts down. She can’t think of that right now. She has to keep moving, keep looking forward so she doesn’t trip on the jagged shrapnel of her past. She has to keep running.

Towards the cathedral.

The canyon, when she finds it, looks different in the dark, the rockfaces looming oppressive on either side of her. It’s darker here, moon-shadows cast deep and unbreachable across the pass. She doesn’t have a torch – the only light source she has is the sonic, and that hardly does the job. But she pulls it out anyway, scanning ahead of her. It whirrs – the signal she’d seen in the TARDIS is here too, but stronger, just like she’d known it would be. She’s heading in the right direction then, at least. It doesn’t take her long after that to find the fork she’d tried to take before, when Zappa had stopped her. She moves down it, urgency and anticipation growing. Time is twisting and rolling, pulled in and out like putty until she can’t tell if time is moving too _fast_ or too _slow_ for her. She pushes through it, even as the slope of the path pitches down suddenly, and she’s forced to scrabble for footholds. The ground beneath her feet becomes more precarious, more boulders than sand as the rockfaces on either side of her begin to narrow, pressing in. But this body is smaller and lither than she’s ever been, and she makes it through with space to spare until the canyon opens out completely and she’s stumbling down into the desert below.

Ahead of her, bathed in moonlight, is the ruin.

Victory flutters through her, and she grins before breaking into a run, the wind erasing the footprints left in her wake. It’s so close, she can feel it, even as the stretch of sand between her and the cathedral feels endless. She doesn’t stop running the whole way, already reaching out with her mind. There’s something hidden in that place, she’s so sure of it – hidden, and waiting. Waiting for _her._ The answers to all her questions are just within her reach, if only she keeps going. Just a little further –

She makes it to the first, outlying pillars, her veins surging with triumph. She reaches out, running her hand along the closest one, the white stone smooth and dusty against her skin. Above her, the arches that are more complete reach up to the sky like a giant’s ribcage. Some distant part of her questions it. _White_ stone. All the stone she’s seen around here is _purple._ But she pushes it aside, her thoughts torqued away to more important things. The interior sections. She fiddles with the sonic, before pointing it towards the large part of the building that still remains intact. The instrument whirrs for a moment, before the readings appear across the tiny screen. Weak, background readings that hadn’t been detectable before, hadn’t made _sense_ on their own have now come together, the puzzle complete.

A breath hitches in her throat.

“ _No…_ ” she breathes. “It _can’t be…_ ”

She tries the sonic again, disbelief fighting for purchase against desperate, overwhelming _hope,_ but loses utterly when the sonic readings remain the same.

“You _can’t be…_ ” she mutters to the ruins. A laugh bubbles in her throat, delighted and incredulous. “Oh, but you _are, YES!”_

She runs through the skeletal remains of what would have been the nave until she reaches the steps up to the altar. She passes it, running her hand along the edge, and even in the dim light she can make out the circular script engraved into stone. That last piece of evidence destroys any doubt left in her mind, and she continues on, drawn in, her mind narrowing down on the ornate door in the wall before her. She steps towards it, and time seems to slow, dragging and pooling at her feet. Her movements are regal – religious, almost. The priest returning home.

 _You are not alone, Doctor,_ the wind whispers, and even the memories that try to surface at _that_ thought are unsuccessful, drowned out by her pure, unadulterated focus.

She reaches the door. Her hands brushes against the wood, and beneath her fingertips there’s a hum.

Relief.

Tears well in her eyes, and she blinks them away, swallowing, before she pushes open the door.

The room beyond is pitch black, but the moment she steps through the threshold, lights flicker on one by one around the walls and up in the ceiling. Majestic arches reach up around a circular set of steps and out from the column that sits in the centre. At its base is a rounded console.

“A _TARDIS…_ ” the Doctor breathes.

The central column lights up, a gentle technological blue. Around her, the room sings in response.

_Another TARDIS…_

She hasn’t seen one other than her own and the Master’s since the War…

Even now, with it standing right in front of her, she can’t quite believe it.

A grin cracks across her face, and she dashes over to the console, bounding up the steps. She circles it for a moment, admiring it, before gently reaching out to press a hand against the column over a crack that runs down the glass. There’s a _whorp,_ like a whiney, similar to her own TARDIS but _different,_ individual in the way TARDISes always are. She closes her eyes and tries to focus, her mind brushing against the telepathic circuits carefully. The ship’s consciousness moves beneath her, like a whale under the surface of the water. It pushes startlingly vivid images forward into her mind –

 _– the toll of a cloister bell, swirling incoherence as_  
 _time and space and reality_  
 _fall away into nothingness_ –

– _the view of a planet she doesn’t recognise from orbit, green and full of life –_

_– the smell of notebook pages –_

_– the smell of dust through the streets of the Citadel –_

It overwhelms her, and she shakes her head to clear it, ignoring the wave of dizziness that follows. Those aren’t her memories. They must hold meaning for this TARDIS – a telepathic imprint of its pilot, like fingerprints on a mirror. She’d got the emotional gist of it, though. Afraid and curious and…

_Lonely._

_Achingly_ lonely _._

She opens her eyes, gently pulling her hand away. She pauses for a moment, before moving around to run a basic diagnostic, her thoughts already racing. How had this TARDIS got here? Had it been pulled in here too, like she had, or did it fall through from the Time War like everything else in this place? And why had it made itself look like a _ruin?_ Enormous, not enough to actually contain its entire internal dimensions – but TARDISes always looked _small,_ to _hide._ And a ruin, not an intact building – that suggests extensive damage. Maybe that’s why it’s so _big –_ the countable infinity of rooms beginning to leak out into this dimension. She turns ideas over in her head, testing out theories. Maybe it had a much rougher landing than she did. Or maybe, if it really had come from the War, it had been damaged already…

Either way, one thing is certain – or, rather, one thing is _missing._

“Where’s your pilot?” she murmurs, looking up. The arches above her curve into the patterned ceiling where light shines through the gaps. She tries not to feel a little desperate. “Where’s your timelord?”

The ships moans in response, grief-stricken.

The Doctor shakes her head. _No. Please no, not when she’s so close. Not when she’s so, so alone._ “Please, I need them – I need them to be _alive,_ there’s – there’s no-one else _left._ ”

The ship just moans again, only it’s even _worse_ this time, and she can feel the anguish of it in her bones. She rests her hand on the console.

“Are you _sure?”_ she says, her voice cracking. “Maybe they just wandered off – there’s a settlement near here, maybe they just –”

The signal.

She suddenly remembers what had drawn her here in the first place.

“There’s a _signal_ ,” she tells the ship, moving around the console. “That’s you, isn’t it? Did your pilot set that up? Is it a distress signal?” But then her brow crinkles, considering the facts. “But that doesn’t _fit._ Why mask a distress signal? Why would you make it keep someone grounded here with you?”

And yet she finds it – the frequency amplifier on the console is active, sending out the same signal she’d seen in her own TARDIS, although significantly stronger now she’s at the source.

“But – _why?_ ” Maybe they’d been afraid to attract unwanted attention from anyone other than another timelord – but it still didn’t _fit._ There are _other ways_ to send out covert signals that don’t involve dooming other TARDISes to be _stranded_ on a planet that is like _poison_ to them, with all the temporal tears and dimensional weak points –

An alarming thought crosses her mind. “How long have you been _stuck here?”_

But before she can get an answer, the diagnostic bings, complete. She moves herself around to the screen, immediately wincing at the results. There’s a lot of systems down. She’s doubts it’ll take off – if it could _ever_ take off again. But that’s not all. There’s something… _off_ in general about the ship, she suddenly realises. It doesn’t _feel right._ She’d first put it down to the fact each TARDIS is different, but now…

…she isn’t so sure.

Being stuck in a place like this for so long…

Cautiously, she takes a step back from the console, trying to decide what to do. Prioritise. Right. The first thing she should do is turn off the signal, so at least she’ll be able to move her TARDIS. Then she can start investigating what happened here – figure out what happened to the timelord who owned this ship.

She needs to know.

The Master turned everything to ash, and now _he_ is gone too – like dust in the wind.

“ _Everything else is gone,_ ” she whispers, as she moves around to the frequency amplifier again, considering how to shut off the signal. “ _Please_ …please let me have this.”

She glances at it for a moment, noting the differences between this console and her own, before beginning to fiddle with the instruments. A sense of unease and panic _immediately_ brushes against her mind – the TARDIS, like the whale under the water, only now it’s knocking against the boat, threatening to capsize her. She sends back a wave of reassurance, not pausing in her task for a moment.

“Shhh, it’s ok,” she soothes. “Don’t worry. I’ll fix this.”

But the TARDIS isn’t calmed at all. The sudden bloom of distress is all the warning she gets before something _hits_ her, a surge of energy jumping from the console and into her with a jolt. She cries out, staggering back, muscles spasming as every synapse lights up with pain and her head is _screaming,_ like her skull is splitting open and she –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry ehehehe
> 
> If you want to see what I based the cathedral TARDIS off, check out [this awesome picture](https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/012/470/202/large/peter-mckinstry-mt-flat-as.jpg?1534955638) by [Peter Mckinstry](https://www.artstation.com/petermckinstry) on ArtStation!
> 
> Next chapter posted next Wednesday. Thanks for reading!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we go, lads

There’s a hum.

Her eyes open, heavy with pain. The world is titled at an angle she can’t quite work out. There are lights, blurred.

What…?

She’s lying on the floor.

What happened?

She blinks slowly, reaching in her mind for context, memories. But her hands only find fog that dissipates between her fingers, and she frowns. Her head, she realises, is empty.

A sense of dread sits deep in the pit of her stomach, and carefully she gets her arms underneath her and pushes herself upright. Her limbs ache, and her headache protests with intensity, but she squints through it with a groan. Looks around. She’s on the floor of an enormous room, by a console. None of it looks familiar. Again, she reaches out, desperate, into the sparseness of her own mind –

But there’s nothing.

How did she get here?

She doesn’t know.

Where is she?

She doesn’t know.

… _who_ is she?

She doesn’t _know._

What _species_ is she?

_She doesn’t know._

A shaky breath escapes a throat. Right. _Right._ Ok. It’s fine. She’s just – having a wobble. That’s right. It’ll come back to her in a moment. She just needs a change of angle, maybe, to kick-start her brain again. She reaches up to grab the edge of the console to pull herself up, but with an abruptness that makes her flinch –

_– music in the streets of the Citadel,  
mountains glistening beyond the glass dome,  
there’s dust in the air, and the smell of it  
aches somehow, and she wonders  
can you be homesick when you’re already home? – _

_– sparks raining down from the ceiling  
as the ship shakes under enemy fire,  
the toll of a cloister bell –_

_– stepping out of TARDIS doors and onto new, strange soil –_

_– yellow sand running through fingers –_

– images flood through her mind, and she gasps, everything suddenly clicking into place. She remembers now. She knows exactly who she is.

She’s a timelord.

This is her TARDIS.

Her name is the Peregrine.

The TARDIS whorps, brushing against her mind with a familiar friendliness and a burst of relief. She smiles, even against her headache. “Yes, alright. It’s fine. What’s happened? Did I hit my head –?”

Something about her voice sounds…strange. But before she can question it, the ship moans in response, unsure. She frowns. No – wait, _yes_ , she remembers.

“There was a crash,” she murmurs, the memories bubbling up unbidden. Swirling incoherence as time and space and reality fell away into nothingness. A shudder runs through her, her thoughts twisting. _Yes,_ she remembers that, sort of – remembers falling…

Something about it doesn’t…quite fit –

– yellow sand running through fingers –

– sparks raining down; the cloister bell is ringing  
the console room is filled with smoke –

_Guh._ She blinks heavily again, trying to clear her head. She needs to keep calm. Then she can figure out what’s going on, fix everything, get back to her job –

Back to the War.

Another shudder runs down her spine. She ignores it, tightening her grip on the console and pulling herself into a standing position. It’s only then that she notices with a startling abruptness that there’s something wrong with her hands. She flinches back, staring at them.

Those aren’t _her_ hands – pale and scuffed with grazes, sand under fingernails. No, her hands are darker, war-worn.

She sucks in a breath.

“I’ve regenerated,” she murmurs. It shouldn’t be possible. She’d been on her last body, she’s _certain_ of it. It isn’t exactly the sort of thing you miscount. So – _how?_ Had something…changed her? She’d heard things, during the War – temporal weapons messing with timelines and lifetimes. She must have just got lucky. Been given an extra chance at life.

She decides not to question it, instead moving around to the console screen, which she flicks off to turn into a black mirror. She runs a hand over her cheek, and the stranger in her reflection mimics her, staring back with bewilderment. Pale skin, light hair with dark roots. She pulls a face.

“Hm, could be worse,” she decides, experimenting briefly with the way her new face scrunches the expressions. She’s about to move on, when her eyes are suddenly drawn to the nasty looking cut on her forehead, just hidden under her hair. _What?_ She frowns, dabbing at it carefully with her fingers. Expectedly, it stings, and she winces, but her hand doesn’t come away red. It’s not a new injury. She keeps staring for a moment, turning the fact over in her mind. She’d presumed she’d just regenerated, but excess regeneration energy would heal any injury instantly. And – well, now she _thinks_ about it, her body isn’t tingling with the tell-tale fizz that always comes post-regeneration. And if this injury is at least a day or so old…

She’s been in this body for at least that long.

There’s a gap in her memories.

“ _Ok,_ ” she says to herself. “Don’t panic. Lots of perfectly reasonable explanations for amnesia. Like concussions, or psychological trauma. Both of which we have – wait, am I talking to myself? I never did that before.” She gives the stranger in the screen a funny look, which they return wholeheartedly. “Alright…nevermind all that.”

There’s something not right here. Even her own words of assurance can’t dislodge the feeling. She mulls it over in her mind for a good few minutes before the TARDIS bleeps at her, and an image is pushed rather forcefully into her mind –

– her mother looks down at her in bed,  
expression concerned as she strokes her forehead –

_– another child looks down at him on the bed,  
frown creasing his face  
“Theta–?” –_

She gasps, stepping back from the console as her headache shrieks behind her eyes. What had _that_ been? The first memory she’d known, of course – it was an image this TARDIS had picked up from her mind to express _concern._ But the second…?

She’d never been a boy. A man, yes, a handful of times. But as a _child –_

“There’s something wrong with me,” she murmurs, clutching the console and thinking back. Where had they been _before?_ She remembers that she’d been scouting out on the far edges of the front, but then –

Oh –

The memory of it stutters and starts like a bad tape recording in her mind, but it comes back to her all the same. She’d received a signal – a call to arms, to return to the front lines. Davros and his armada were at the Gates of Elysium, all soldiers were to be called in. The Nightmare Child was coming but they needed to hold them off until then –

She’d been afraid. But determined. And, more importantly, a good soldier. And so she’d gone without hesitation, even as her TARDIS tried to protest. The Gates, practically the equivalent of a maelstrom in the fabric of spacetime, was exactly the place that a TARDIS would instinctively avoid. But that’s just the whole War in a nutshell, isn’t it? Desperate people walking head first into places that could tear them apart, for the sake of some greater goal.

_The Last Great Time War._

She didn’t think it was so great anymore. At first, her whole heart had been in it – they _had_ to win, for the sake of the universe. Losing wasn’t an option. But now it feels like the War has spread to every inch of reality, the universe they were desperately trying to save swallowed up by the monsters they created.

If they win now, the universe would still be lost.

Even the nebulas are blood-soaked and scarred.

She screws her eyes shut, clutching the edge of the console with a white-knuckled grip.

She’s not even sure they can _win_ anymore.

A shuddery breath escapes from her throat, and she lets it, imagining the despair that overwhelms her leaving her body along with it. Then she opens her eyes and regains her composure. Right. Prioritise. What does she need? What’s _important?_

First – figure out what happened. Run a diagnostic on the TARDIS to see if there’s any damage

Second – if there _is_ damage, patch the TARDIS up enough that it can travel.

Third – as much as she dreads it – get back to the front line.

She lets out another breath.

The fact that there’s something _wrong_ with her – did she _really_ forget regenerating? She must have done, she doesn’t even remember the crash landing, but what was that memory, who was that boy – gets pushed aside. It’s not important. It’s _not._ She can get someone else to look at her head later, figure it out. Right now, she needs sort it all out and get _back._

Alright. She can do this.

She taps the screen again, planning to start running scans to figure out exactly where she’s ended up and what the damage is, when she sees a diagnostic has…already been run. She stares at it for a moment, before coming to the obvious conclusion. She must have run it before she lost her memory. The answer doesn’t soothe her, though, still unsettled as she is, and so she reaches over, pressing a few buttons so she can run a scan for any lifesigns inside the ship. And, on second thoughts, she moves round to check that the limbo atrophier is online. If anyone other than a timelord had entered the TARDIS and tried to use the console, the atrophier would have activated. No-one would have been able to make it past _that,_ surely.

It’s online, just as she thought. But immediately she notices that that’s not all.

There’s something that’s been trapped inside.

The ship whorps at her, lights blinking, almost like it’s trying to drag her attention away. Mentally, she waves it off, a little bemused, before focusing on the atrophier again, pulling up a projection so she can establish what got caught. The image shows a creature in side profile, not a species she recognises – and she’s seen a _lot_ of species, thanks to her job taking her to the farthest flung corners of the conflict. It’s short, with long ears and a sort of poncho-like attire. She glances down at herself, suddenly aware that she is also wearing a poncho. She considers it briefly, adding it to the pile of things that don’t add up in her head, and then turns back to the projection. She wonders if she can turn the image so she can see the front.

The TARDIS whorps at her again, more urgent this time. She grimaces, still resolutely ignoring it as she adjusts the image angle –

_Oh._

_Oh no._

She bites her lip, feeling sick.

The creature inside the limbo atrophier is only… _half_ the creature.

Like it’s been cut in two, right down the middle.

The atrophier must have malfunctioned. Only picked up half the intruder.

She closes her eyes for a moment, before the soldier in her forces her to open them again. She turns the projection off and goes to examine the diagnostic results. She finds she’s right – the defence systems are definitely not operating correctly, but so is practically everything else. The sense of dread in her stomach grows heavier. This is – _not good._ This is more damage than she can feasibly fix short of going back to Gallifrey, but the ship won’t even dematerialise like this, no way.

For a brief moment, she holds onto the hope that this TARDIS could be salvageable. But the thought immediately begins to disintegrates in her grasp, until there’s nothing left but the cold hard facts and the harsh practicality of the matter.

She is stranded in a broken TARDIS, and there is a War she needs to return to.

She steps back from the console, her eyes glancing over to the door.

There is only one sensible option. She needs to explore wherever it is she’s landed, just as she has done on a hundred other planets before, and find another way home. Maybe there’ll be a civilisation capable of space travel – or, if not, there’ll be somewhere she can set up a distress beacon. But sitting in the TARDIS and trying to fix it is simply going to be a waste of time. And time is far too precious these days to _waste._

Decision made, she glances at the column for a moment, her eyes running along a large crack in the glass. Her chest aches. Another TARDIS to be left behind. She wishes it wasn’t this way, but there’s nothing she can do. She really needs to stop getting so attached to them, and yet…

“Thank you, my friend,” she says, patting the console. The ship gives a whine, sliding an image into her mind of when she was lost as a child, looking for her mother. She winces, but ignores it. Pushes it aside. There’s nothing she can do. Truly, there’s nothing.

She moves away, heading towards the doors. The ship makes another noise, this one almost like a desperate cry – _don’t go DON’T GO –_ and she’s confused as to _why_ it’s having such an extreme reaction, but _there’s nothing she can do_ so she keeps going, her hand reaching out to the door handle and –

It won’t open.

She pulls again, and again, _yanking_ it. But it doesn’t work.

The dread is climbing up her ribcage, filling her lungs. She lets go of the door, moving back to the console. She finds the door is deadlocked, but no matter how much she tries to override it, the ship won’t let her.

Like it knows she’s abandoning it.

“Let me _out,_ ” she says. “You have to let me _go._ ”

The TARDIS wails, reluctant. It’s telepathic circuits brush against her mind, jostling something that only adds to her sense of anxiety. Psychically, she jerks away, pulling down barriers in front of her mind. But the ship doesn’t like that – there’s an electronic shriek, and the blue hue of the lights suddenly plunges into red. She steps back from the console, looking up in fear, before running back over to the door. It’s useless, she _knows,_ but she can’t help but desperately try again to pull it open – if she could only yank them _hard enough._

The TARDIS _screams,_ and she jumps back, clutching her hands over her ears. Immediately, a bulkhead falls down like a guillotine in front of her, blocking the exit. Her hearts are hammering now, pulse up in her throat until she can barely even breathe through it.

She’s _trapped._ She’s –

– been running through this castle for days,  
(for _years_ )  
the veiled creature always on his heels  
but now he finds himself trapped  
between it and a wall  
of azbantium and  
 _oh_  
now, finally, he understands –  
  


– he’s got it all wrong, it’s for him  
 _it’s for him_  
and now they’re dragging him towards  
his prison,  
his pandorica and  
he doesn’t know how he’s going  
to save the day this time –

She staggers back, memories that can’t be hers (– except they are hers, _they are –_ ) shaken lose and rattling inside her mind. She doesn’t know what they are, why they’re in her head, but with them has come a desperate sense of realisation. She – the person in the not-memories – has always escaped before. Always made it out. Always found a _way._ She’s just got to do the same. Yes, _yes,_ there’s got to be a way –

She turns, a plan barely even formed as she races towards the corridor that leads deeper into the TARDIS, thoughts swirling as she goes. The corridors are dark, bathed in red emergency lighting, her footfalls echoing off the walls. Where is she going? She’s not sure, but her feet seem to know, immediately taking her in the direction of the engine room. Her brain is quickly catching up, pieces falling into place even through her confusion. The engine room _– yes,_ there are emergency protocols, ways to shut a TARDIS down with immediate effect. She’s just got to do something _stupid_ and _dangerous_ enough to make a failsafe trigger – and for some reason, she gets the feeling that’s her speciality.

But the ship around her, whilst blocked from the exact thoughts of her mind, seems to sense the direction she’s heading in, and shrieks in panic and fury. The floor jerks under her feet and she falls, landing on her side. It’s right then that the lights go out so completely that she’s hit with the terrifying notion that –

– he’s blind, completely and utterly,  
no sonic, no TARDIS,  
and only ten minutes of oxygen left  
but he’ll pull this off, he _will,_  
because he’s brilliant  
but more importantly because  
if he doesn’t,  
Bill and Nardole won’t make it –

She gasps, the not-memory (or maybe-memory?) slicing through her mind, and she closes her eyes since they’re useless now anyway and finds the nearest wall with her hand, pulling herself up. She needs to keep going. She stumbles on, using the wall as a guide. She can’t _see,_ how is she supposed to do this? There’s an electronic whine in her ears, and her pulses thunder in her head. The TARDIS – there’s something _wrong_ with it, something _very wrong –_ she can sense it now, when it sweeps past her, banging against the shutters around her mind. It’s _twisted, sick,_ gone _completely insane_ and, for some reason, it _doesn’t want to let her go_ –

The part of her that is _the Pergerine_ wants to push down the fear that bristles inside of her, supress everything until the task is complete, just as she’s always done. But the _other_ part of her, the man in her maybe-memories, that part wants to _embrace_ the fear. To hold it close until it burns, to run and run and _run –_

_– fear keeps you fast  
fear keeps you alive – _

She opens her eyes to the dark, adrenaline bursting through her veins.

She still can’t see.

But she doesn’t _need to see_ , that other part of her whispers.

She pushes off from the wall, remembered images of TARDIS corridors flickering through her mind – some hers, some _others,_ or is it the other way around? – and she runs, entrusting her feet to the metal plating even as the ship screams around her. She’s not sure anymore if this is her ship – she’s starting to not be sure who _she_ is, exactly, but whoever she is, she knows about TARDISes. She knows that the ship can change its layout with ease, stop her from ever getting to the engine room. But – _but but but –_

The plan unfurls in her mind, blossoming. _Yes._ This ship is broken, damaged – if the lights were to come back on, she’s sure she’d see it, places where the plating has buckled and twisted, leaving tears in the structure of the ship. In any other kind of ship, that would just make it _weak_ on a physical level, liable to collapse. But a TARDIS is a ship born of dimensional engineering, and such tears would mean the laws of _space_ are warped, distorted. If she can find a hole big enough and squeeze through – well, she could end up anywhere else in the TARDIS. The ship might be able to change the layout of rooms, corridors – but a structural tear like that would be static. _Fixed._ Her only chance.

 _No,_ the part of her that is the Peregrine thinks sternly. _That’s far too risky. Too dangerous. We could go through a hundred holes and **never** reach the engine room._

 _OR,_ the other, nameless part of her thinks, fizzing at the edges, _we could go through one and find it right away. Or we could find it in a hundred and one holes! We don’t know. All we know is that it gives us a CHANCE, a chance we DON’T have if we keep running around aimlessly in the dark!_

It’s then, like the ship around her heard the thoughts, that the lights snap on with a dazzling glare. She gives a shout, hands going to her eyes as she stumbles to a stop. Seconds tick on, moments falling into oblivion before she can stand the brightness. Gingerly, the lowers her hands, squinting against the glare. At the sight in the corridor in front of her, the hairs on the back of her neck and across her arms stand on end. A strong gust of wind tugs at her hair and her clothes.

Before her is a swirling mass of incoherence, time and space twisting and falling away before her. Her breath hitches in her throat, ice-cold fear catching in her lungs.

It looks like the Gates of Elysium.

The memory splits through her mind from two perspectives – two timelords lurching around two TARDIS console rooms as their ships shriek in their minds, reluctant to fly any closer to the cascading pit of clashing realities. Davros and his armada had been there, flying head on into the jaws of the Nightmare Child, and she remembers being both the one who would try to save them, the one who was _terrified_ at what he’d become, and the one who was just a soldier, the one who –

_– the toll of a cloister bell,  
swirling incoherence as  
time and space and reality  
fall away into nothingness –_

She staggers back.

The one who had fallen through.

She stares, unable to take her eyes away in her terror.

“It’s not real,” she tries to tell herself. “It can’t be.”

It’s not the Gates. That would be _ridiculous_ – it’s just – it’s just the ship, getting in her head. Even shut off from her thoughts, the telepathic abilities of a TARDIS combined with its ability to drastically manipulate its environment are something to be reckoned with. The Gates physically _can’t_ be standing in front of her in the TARDIS corridor, and she _knows_ it’s not real because her time sense would be going _haywire_ right now if it was.

But with two sets of memories raging behind her eyes –

It feels _very_ real indeed.

She closes her eyes, willing herself to be brave.

– “ _Let me be brave,_ ” someone  
important to him whispers, but  
he doesn’t quite remember them anymore  
only that it hurts –

She can’t see the lights.

Only the pink of her eyelids and darkness behind.

– there’s nothing in the dark  
that’s not there in the light –

She steps forward.

And again.

And again.

And again and again until with an abruptness that _clicks_ in her ears, the roaring wind is gone and the brightness immediately dims. Her eyes snap open, and before her is the corridor, empty and lit at normal levels.

She allows herself a brief grin of victory, before she presses onwards again, knowing that there’s far more the ship can throw at her. But now she can see, and so she stands a chance at finding a hole to slip through. Her pace quickens into a run as her eyes scan her surroundings. There’s plenty of damage, sure, but nothing big enough yet, nothing she can _use –_

She emerges from a junction between corridors, and is provided with three different routes. It doesn’t take her long to decide which way she needs to go – at the far end of one, before it turns a corner, she can make out a huge tear in the back wall.

“ _Yes,”_ she mutters, before heading straight for it at a hard run. But the wall doesn’t get closer – no, it gets _further away_ with each step. Forever unreachable. She stumbles to a stop, confusion rippling through her mind. A glance over her shoulder, and she can see that the junction between corridors has gone, transformed into a perpetual stretch. She looks back at the tear, thoughts racing. Turning the problem over in her mind. No. Not unreachable. There’s always a kind of logic to these things. It’s not that it’s getting further. It’s just space has gone all topsy-turvy, and every step in one direction is actually a step in the other. Classic trick – one she’s used before. Or, maybe not her. She pushes the thought aside before it can disorient her further.

If a step forwards is a step _backwards…_

She turns, walking in the opposite direction down the corridor. It all looks the same, like a mirror facing a mirror and reflecting itself into infinity. But after ten paces, she turns, looking back over her shoulder, and the tear at the end of the corridor is paradoxically closer.

Her grin returns, and she looks away again, setting off into a run until she feels the strange tingle at the back of her neck like there’s something behind her. Without looking, she reaches her hand back. She immediately hits the wall, fingers finding buckled metal. She turns.

The tear stretches right up to the ceiling, ugly and torqued, but perfectly big enough for her to wriggle through. She can’t see much through the gap, other than a bleed through of pure white light from an unknown source. She hesitates briefly, wondering if maybe she should come up with a better plan – but then there’s a furious shriek all around her, and she looks over her shoulder to see the other end of the corridor rushing up behind her at high speed.

She doesn’t think. She just scrambles through the tear and into the bright white and –

She falls.

– through the nightsky,  
watching as her TARDIS,  
burning and broken,  
dematerialises in front of her eyes –  
  


She lands with a _thump_ on something… _soft?_

No…grainy.

Wet.

She opens her eyes to a grey, overcast sky. For a moment, she can’t make sense of it, but then it clicks. It’s both real and not – she’s still on the TARDIS, but this is a reality _within_ the ship. There’s plenty of rooms like this – little environments, microcosms hidden away in pocket dimensions. She turns her head to find herself on a beach, wet sand sticking to her hair and her clothes. She groans, pushing herself upright. It’s cold here, and she clutches her poncho around her as she looks out towards the sea. There’s a lighthouse, just off the coast. She frowns at it, before looking back to the shore. A few hundred metres away from her, tied to a rotting groyne, is a single wooden row boat.

She looks back towards the lighthouse again, her gaze pulled towards it.

She needs to go there.

Part of her wants to reject the notion, to do the exact opposite – if the TARDIS is getting in her head, she needs to ignore her gut instincts, right? Because it lured her here before, didn’t it? Lured her out across the sand –

Wait, what?

She shakes her head.

“I’m the Peregrine and this is _my_ TARDIS,” she says, like a mantra, even though she’s not sure she believes it anymore. There are too many memories flickering behind her eyes, and the duality of it is making her head ache. She presses her hand against her face for a moment, before her gaze flicks out to where the lighthouse stands, stark white against the darkening clouds.

A storm is gathering.

If she wants to get there, she needs to go now.

Determined, she pushes herself up before stumbling across the sand to the boat. It doesn’t take her long to reach it, and to her relief she finds it still intact and – hopefully – sea worthy, bar the pale blue paint that’s peeling off the sides. She makes quick work of untying it, before pushing it out into the ice-cold water. She lets out a small gasp as it immediately soaks through her boots and trousers, but she doesn’t stop, clambering into the boat as soon as it’s over the first wave. There are two oars, and she takes hold of them, beginning to row out into the sea. The wind is strong and salty, and her hair is immediately tangled, whipping past her eyes. But she doesn’t care – she just keeps her gaze locked on the lighthouse.

The further she goes, the rougher the waves become, kicking up spray and soaking her even further. Her stomach churns as the horizon dips and rises, and it’s not long before rain begins to fall, biting at her face. The clouds above her begin to rumble, and for a moment she thinks she sees the ghostly shape of the Nightmare Child silhouetted against a flash of lightning. There are shadows in the water too – Neverweres and Meanwhiles and all the other hoards of the Time War, taunting her like sirens. But she keeps rowing, even as her muscles scream in protest, even when she thinks the waves might capsize her. Her eyes are fixed on the lighthouse, the sentinel that is slowly, _slowly_ getting closer. And it feels like a second of eternity –

– _“How long is a second of eternity?” he asks,  
and the other boy looks at him with a grin.  
“Come on, Thete,” he says,  
“Surely you know the story of the shepherd boy –”_

– will pass before she gets there, but then time skips and lurches and she finds herself running aground, the boat scraping against the stones of the beach. She scrambles out, looking up at the lighthouse. The epicentre of the storm seems to be just above it, the clouds twisting and circling behind the pinnacle. She pulls her gaze back down to the base. There’s a door – small, wooden. She makes a beeline for it, but as she gets closer the wind gets stronger and stronger, like the storm doesn’t want her to make it. A gust nearly pushes her over, and by the time she reaches the building she ends up clinging to the door frame as she twists the handle, just so she can stay standing. The moment the lock clicks, the door swings inwards and she falls through into –

The lantern room at the top of the lighthouse, her back against the window. She stares at the lamp and mass of lenses in front of her for a moment. They’re blackened, broken, like they’ve been that way forever. She frowns, before turning back to look at the sky, the tempest grumbling just above her.

_What?_

Something isn’t right, besides the obvious. She can feel it, like static in the air. Her time sense is twisted, wrong, like someone’s pulled it out of her and turned it inside out. Her hearts pound in her throat.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she murmurs, just before a clap of thunder breaks out above her, loud enough to rattle the windows. Moments later, a lightning bolt crackles from the sky, surging downwards. It strikes the top of the lighthouse with a deafening burst of heat and plasma. She ducks downwards just as the room explodes and everything is nothing but light. She stays down for a moment, ears ringing, before she lifts her head up, pushing her wet hair out of her face. She rolls onto her back, squinting against the light.

Inexplicably, the lamp is switched on, blindingly bright. She covers her eyes.

_“What…?”_

It takes her a moment, her mind grappling with cause and effect before she stumbles across the obvious answer.

The thunder before the lightning.

The blackened lenses before the strike.

 _“Time is running backwards,_ ” she breathes, pushing herself up. She looks away from the light for long enough that the spots disappear from her vision, and she can see the controls that must operate the lamp. She moves over, glancing at them for a moment with intrigue. These aren’t lighthouse controls – they’re _TARDIS_ controls. She runs a hand along it, considering. Is this a back-up console? A secondary control room? A maintenance cupboard with added switches?

It doesn’t really matter what it is – what matters is whether she can _use it._ She briefly considers her options, and quickly spots a screen embedded into the worktop. It looks rudimentary, but it’s clearly just a veneer for something much more advanced – like the chameleon circuit on a TARDIS, or a chameleon arch on a timelord. She fiddles with the dials on its side, flipping through options. It’s mostly showing schematics and damage reports, and the further she goes the more she thinks that this is a maintenance station. Which means…if she can find something that will show her where the worst of the tears are, she could find a map – find a way to the engine room.

She twists the dials a little more, and after a few more flicks, it appears – a diagram of the worst damaged areas.

“ _Yes!_ ” she says, and then her face twists into a frown. “Oh – no, that’s probably _less_ good.”

According to the diagram, there’s a gaping hole in the fabric of the TARDIS right underneath her.

At the base of the lighthouse.

“That explains it,” she murmurs, changing the view settings. Immediately she sees it – extensive amounts of artron energy are leaking out, _pouring_ through the gap like a flood.

Artron energy. From the time engines, she’s _certain_ of it.

Which means the engine room has to be on the other side. Which _is_ a good thing, she supposes – apart from the fact she’s not sure how this ends. Or, rather, she knows _exactly_ how this ends, because time is running backwards. This ends with her facing the window just after the lightning strike.

So the _real_ question is – how does it _start?_

If she goes down the lighthouse and jumps into the crack, is that what sent her to the top of the lighthouse in the first place? Cause after effect, trapping her in an anti-clockwise temporal loop?

 _Or…_ will it take her where she needs to go?

It might be the only way out.

It might also _kill her,_ something bleeding out that much temporal energy.

There’s only really one way she can find out.

And what _else_ can she do? Stay there in the lantern room and watch the storm rage in reverse?

No. She might not know who she is, but she does know that she’s not the type to stand around and do _nothing._

She moves to the door, pulling it open to see the steep staircase that leads down to the next level. She clambers down, ducking her head, before she stumbles out onto the platform at the end. There’s a railing, and she presses against it, leaning over and looking down the tower of the lighthouse and right to the bottom.

There, stretched out below her like a chasm, is the tear. Swirling wisps of gold are streaming out from it, sending shudders down her time sense. She can’t look away from it – and that’s when she realises this is what drew her to the lighthouse in the first place. There’s no way she would have been able to resist it.

There’s no way she can resist it now.

She hears another groan above her – the rumble of thunder. Like a warning – like a threat.

Is it the TARDIS around her, telling her not to go?

She doesn’t know.

She can’t find it in her to care.

With a hand still gripping the railing, she runs down the stairs, racing towards the bottom. It’s a long way – longer than she thought, but it seems that her legs are used to running, and she gets no complaints from them. She’s about two-thirds of the way down when she hears a loud _crack,_ and she looks up with a flash of alarm. Above her, the staircase is disintegrating, dissipating into nothing as the temporal energy begins to tear the building apart like it never even existed. With a flicker of alarm, she turns back, leaping down the steps as fast as she can, but it’s not fast _enough._ She needs to – she –

She needs to do something stupid.

With barely a second thought, she hauls herself up onto the railing, crouching, struggling to balance on the thin strip of metal. But then, she supposes, balance doesn’t really matter. Not if you intend to fall.

The stairs just above her are breaking away, bricks cascading down before turning to dust before her eyes. She’s got seconds – maybe less than that. She looks down, taking one look at the gaping maw of bleeding time that awaits her, ravenous.

 _This is survivable,_ she thinks, just as she tenses her muscles and pushes herself off the railing. _Right?_

And then she is falling, the tear racing closer as everything crumbles around her. She hits the event horizon, and it’s like falling against a mirror, the invisible surface of it shattering in the impact, but she keeps going, through the kaleidoscope of smeared spectrums and the watercolour bleed of incoherence, her timeline twisting and shrieking in pain. There are shards falling around her, reflecting images that are both hers and not, and something catches in her throat as a sudden thought hits her. She doesn’t know who she is. She truly has no idea, and if this kills her then she’ll never find out, she’ll never _know_ and then she’ll just be a mystery, a timeless creature lost in a strange universe. Tears prick at her eyes, because it _hurts_ , more deeply than it should, perhaps, and she just looks up as she falls, watching as the light above her grows smaller, smaller until it is nothing more than a pinprick –

– she hits with floor with a _crack,_ the floor beneath her so much less forgiving than the sand from before. She feels like her timeline has been put through a shredder and knitted back together with a sharp needle, and even the slight shift of movement sends a shiver of prickles across her skin.

“ _Ow,_ ” she grumbles, wincing as she forces herself to roll onto her side. Her thoughts are scattered, stranded on separate neurons like stars thrown into space by an uncaring hand, an unfeeling explosion of light. She blinks owlishly, before pushing herself up with her elbows and looking around.

The room is large, dark and full of pillars and arches, like the crypt of a cathedral. But at the same time, it’s advanced. Technological. Directly in front of her, bathing the room in a greenish-blue glow, are the time engines. There’s four of them, stacked into one column with protective arches curling around them. One of them seems to be fine – or rather, operational at least – but the other three are cracked open, internal working spilling out and bleeding artron energy. The air is so heavy with it that she can _taste_ it, metallic on her tongue. She takes in a slow breath like she’s trying to buy herself time. Right. Engine room.

Her memories are so confused that it takes her a moment to pinpoint exactly _why_ she needs to shut the TARDIS down, but then the floor shakes under her feet and an electronic groan fills the air and – _oh, yes, she remembers._ The ship’s telepathic circuits brush against her, both predatory and aching with desperation. She shakes her head, before pushing herself up and striding forwards, past the engines and towards the console behind. She doesn’t hesitate, not letting herself have time to think, immediately reaching for the dynamorphic accelerator. As soon as she touches it, there’s a spark, and an arch of electricity leaps out and strikes her hand. She yelps, drawing back. _Dammit –_ the ship isn’t going to let her touch the controls – but she _needs to,_ she needs to, unless –

A strange feeling shifts in her chest, and under some instinctual realisation, she reaches a hand into her trouser pockets. Her fingers brush against something long and vaguely cylindrical, and she pulls it out. It’s –

– “my _sonic,_ ” she cries, distraught,  
all new and feeling like she’s about to burst  
in the darkness of the train carriage.  
“I’ve lost my _sonic,_ oh I _hate_ empty pockets!”–

She turns it over in her hands, urgency bristling at the edges of her consciousness but drowned out by the stillness that has overcome her mind.

A sonic instrument.

A tool.

– “A sonic _what?!”_  
“ _Screwdriver!”_ –

She grips it in her hand like she’s not completely sure it’s real.

If this is hers –

But the Peregrine never had something like this.

Which can only mean that she is _not_ the Peregrine.

A shuddery breath escapes her.

It is one thing to suspect that you are not who you think you are. It’s another thing entirely to come face to face with it.

She glances up, looking at the console in front of her. The ship around her whines, tormented and _hurt,_ and she closes her eyes against the tears that prick there. She’s overcome, suddenly, with the urge to _help_ the thing. Not to escape. Not to turn her back.

“ _Please,”_ she says. “Please let me do this.”

The ship shrieks around her, not understanding, only afraid _so afraid._

“ _Please,_ ” she repeats, raising the shutters around her mind just enough to project a sense of reassurance. “Let me _help you._ You have to let me _help you._ ”

The room shakes around her. The walls moan. But nothing strikes out at her. Nothing tries to stop her.

She opens her eyes and raises her sonic. With a press of the button comes the whine that is both familiar and a stranger to her. Ahead of her, the dynamorphic accelerator flicks up, and there’s a mechanical groan behind her as components strain under duress. Gas vents as pressure builds, the light radiating from the engine fades to orange and there’s a rumble in the floor beneath her. For a moment she can’t help but wonder if maybe the safety systems were also damaged in the crash – if the failsafe will even _activate –_

But then there’s a _shunk_ , and the room is plunged into darkness.

For a moment, she just stands there, breathing shakily with her arm still raised. Then, slowly, she lowers it, her grip on the sonic white-knuckled. Tentatively, she completely removes the blockades she’s erected around her mind and feels around for the ship’s consciousness. It doesn’t take her long to find it – it’s asleep, forced into temporary hibernation by the shutdown. She lets out a sigh, the tension leaving her shoulders in one great huff.

She’s ok.

It’s all ok.

She closes her eyes briefly against the darkness, taking a moment to calm the jackhammer beat of her hearts.

Then she puts the sonic in her pocket and makes her way back to the console room.

By the time she arrives, the influence that the TARDIS had forced upon her mind has begun to unravel, and she’s able to distinguish between _her_ memories – the Doctor’s memories – and the memories of the _Peregrine,_ who had clearly been the pilot. It’s more than a little disorientating to try and examine the memories too closely, but from what she can tell, the Peregrine was a soldier of the Time War, one who would go and scout out planets at the furthest reaches of the front line. Looking for strange and new technologies that could be used against the Daleks – or maybe just for historical events and Jonbar Hinges that could be used as bullets. She’d been called to the battle at the Gates of Elysium – one that the Doctor herself remembers far too well. Davros and his armada against the Nightmare Child. Davros had sent out a distress signal to her – or, rather, her when she was old and grizzly – and she had gone to try and save him, sick of the blood on her hands. And she’d _tried,_ she really had, but it had turned out Davros hadn’t wanted to be saved. He’d just wanted her to watch, helpless, as his command ship was devoured by the horror she’d helped to create.

The Peregrine had been there too, clearly.

Only she’d never made it out.

She’d been knocked aside and caught in the gravitational field of the Gates, sucked down into the anti-matter cascade and –

Spat out here. On a planet full of temporal scars, in a TARDIS so broken it would never be able to fly again.

The Doctor stands in the archway between the corridor and the dim console room, looking in. She understands now what the ship had tried to do to her – shoving the memories of its pilot into her head so she would think she was them. So the ship wouldn’t be alone anymore.

Part of her thinks she should hate it for doing such a thing – psychically kidnapping her and making her believe she was someone she wasn’t. But she can’t. She can’t hate it because _she understands._

She knows exactly how it feels to be lost and alone in the dark.

She moves towards the console, beginning to dig around for the flight recorder. Most TARDISes have them (she…may have ripped her own one out at some point), but _especially_ the Battle TARDISes, which she’s pretty certain this one is. A Type 91, at a guess. And they’re _usually_ placed just under the base of the console, and so she pulls out her sonic and starts yanking up panels. It’s not long before she lays her hands on it, tugging it out of a tangled nest of wires. Unlike a lot of the ship’s systems, it looks mostly intact, and so she prises it open and glances at it for a moment, before sticking her fingers right into the small telepathic interface. Immediately, she’s hit with a swathe of images she recognises already from the Peregrine’s memories, only from a slightly different perspective and filled to the brim with additional data – temporal-spatial coordinates, flight speed, systems damage, and plenty more besides. She feels it, from within the ship, as they are sucked into the gaping maw of the Gates of Elysium. She feels how the TARDIS is ravaged from the inside, temporal eddies ripping it apart as it tumbles down, down, down into the abyss until there is only dust and heat and nothingness.

She gasps, yanking her hand back as if she’s been burnt.

According to the recorder, the Peregrine had survived the crash, but with serious injuries.

For six hours she had worked gruellingly, _desperately,_ trying to fix something that couldn’t be fixed. Then, she had wandered out into the sand, looking for any resources. She’d come back sunburnt a few hours later, arms filled with shrapnel like the Doctor had found, only newer. But it hadn’t been enough. Too little, too late.

She’d died on the floor in the console room, in her thirteenth and final regeneration.

And the TARDIS had been alone, surrounded by so many temporal tears…

“You’ve been here,” she says to the it, voice cracking, “since _the Time War_.”

This planet, the loss and the loneliness must have made it _sick._ Driven it _insane._

And no-one had come for it.

Of course they hadn’t.

So it had sent out a signal – it hadn’t been the Peregrine, it had been the ship itself. It had been so _desperate_ that it had reached out to any TARDIS that travelled close enough and tore it out of the vortex, grounding it here, just so it wouldn’t be alone anymore.

She sits back, leaning her head against the console. Tears prick behind her eyes and she screws them shut.

“I’m _sorry,_ ” she gasps, even though she didn’t even _know_ – there’s no way she could have known. But this ship and its pilot are just two more things she failed to save, aren’t they? Just more broken fragments left behind for her to cut herself open on. “I’m so, _so_ sorry.”

The ship, asleep as it is, can’t hear her. Can’t feel her. But she rests a hand against the edge of the console and thinks about how long it must have _hurt_ for, abandoned out here, external shell expanding in grief and slowly losing its mind.

It couldn’t even cry.

And so, alone and without even the wind to witness her, she cries on its behalf.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The weirdest thing about writing this part was, after writing about 25k of desert scenes, writing the beach and lighthouse scenes. My brain was like ‘cold?? Wet?? Sounds fake’
> 
> Hope you enjoyed it! Next chapter will be up on Wednesday. Please let me know what you thought! 
> 
> I designed a cover for this fic - it's [here](https://picnokinesis.tumblr.com/post/618041244839460864/a-cover-for-my-doctor-who-fanfic-in-the-wind) if you want to check it out!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is! The last chapter! I really hope you enjoy and thank you so much for reading <3

The ship awakens after the Doctor’s tears are all spent. The first thing she feels is a flickering echo at the edges of her consciousness, and then it encroaches in slowly, frightened. Images shudder in the back of her mind – bursts of sparks and cloister bells – but she returns it with a memory of her own –

– the night sky over Gallifrey,  
crammed full of stars –

_Safe._

– he’s lying in the red grass,  
looking up in silent wonder –

_Calm._

– he turns to face the boy beside him,  
Koschei,  
smiling at him.  
He returns it with a grin of his own.

_Home._

Even if that planet, that boy, aren’t truly home for her anymore.

The ship moans, but the sense of fear retreats into cautiousness. The Doctor lets out a breath. Progress. She swallows and looks up at the central column and on into the ceiling.

“I know what you did to me,” she tells it, “but I also know what happened to you and your pilot. And I meant what I said back in the engine room. I want to help you. But you have to let me.”

She feels the ship turn over the idea with nervousness, like a wild animal deciding whether it can trust her. With an optimism and trust that is perhaps foolish considering what this TARDIS already did to her, she keeps her mind open so that it can see that her words are in earnest. It sticks to the edges of her mind, careful. It could just take her again, or hide her away in the deepest corners of its vast interior, but she pushes her fear aside. It needs her help. That’s the simple fact of the matter. And she will never turn away in the face of something – some _one_ – needing help.

Even if the ship seems beyond repair – she won’t accept it. She _can’t_. She needs – she needs to fix this. Save at least this TARDIS, even if she couldn’t save its pilot.

A few moments pass, seconds ticking away in the silence. Then, with a hum that reverberates in her ribcage, the TARDIS agrees. She manages a smile at that.

“Thank you,” she breathes, giving the console a friendly pat. The ship bloops in response.

Step one complete. Now for step two.

“Alright. Based on what your pilot tried to do the first time, I don’t think I have the resources in _here_ to fix you. But…there _is_ a settlement not far from here with a very clever friend of mine who has a _lot_ of bits and pieces that I’m pretty certain I could use to patch you back up. It’ll be tricky but I’m brilliant so it shouldn’t be a problem.” She pauses, pursing her lips for a moment. “And so…in order to do that…” She looks up at the column, at the crack that runs along it. “You need to let me leave.”

The TARDIS reacts immediately with a loud _shriek,_ coupled with several images of desert, endless desert, of _alone alone ALONE –_

“No no no, shhhh, I know, I’m sorry,” she says, projecting reassurance as hard as she can. “I know. I wouldn’t ask it unless I didn’t have a choice. But I can’t help you if you keep me trapped here. You and I both know that.”

She holds her breath, listening as the ship creaks and whines around her, distress bleeding like watercolours into the back of her mind. It doesn’t trust her to come back. And it can’t _bear_ the idea of being so alone again.

“How can I prove myself to you?” she murmurs, thinking. “You’ve seen my mind. My _name._ The promise I made. Isn’t that enough?”

Apparently not, she thinks as the ship remains unsure.

She thinks.

And then she remembers – Zappa, in her TARDIS while she tried to do repairs. How they’d placed their bag down when they’d gone out into the desert, a non-verbal confirmation of _I’m coming back. I promise._

She hesitates, before reaching into her pocket and pulling out her sonic. She pauses again, before gently placing it on the console, balanced on a couple of levers so it won’t fall.

“This is precious to me,” she says to the ship. “Something I won’t leave this planet without.” She takes a step back from the console. “I’ll come back for this. And I’ll come back for you. Deal?”

For a moment, there’s silence, besides the subtle hum of the TARDIS around her.

Then, without warning, the bulkhead that had fallen lifts up, and the door swings open slightly with a creak. The Doctor smiles.

“Thank you,” she breathes, reaching over to press her hand against the central column. She holds it there for a moment, and the TARDIS gives a quiet whorp. Then, before it can change its mind, she moves away and back out into the sand.

She discovers that it’s early morning, sunlight licking at the horizon and casting the dark shapes of the mesas in an orange glow. She doesn’t waste time, heading straight back along the route towards the settlement. The canyon doesn’t seem as far as it had at night, and she soon finds her scrambling back up into the pass between the rocks. It’s almost a wonder she didn’t slip and break her neck or something. A regeneration would have been pretty inconvenient. But it’s much easier in the growing light, and it’s not long before she can see the settlement in the middle-distance, growing larger as she approaches.

She doesn’t even reach the outskirts of the village, however, before a familiar figure is rushing out across the sand towards her at a break-neck speed.

“Zappa!” she shouts, giving them a wave. They don’t wave back, still running, and the moment they reach her they give her a good _whack_ on her arm as high up as they can reach.

“Hey!” the Doctor protests. “What was _that_ for?!”

Zappa proceeds to reel of an agitated staccato of words that only send splinters into what has become nearly a permanent headache over the last few days, and she winces, holding her hands up.

“Alright, alright!” she says, pausing enough to think about it from Zappa’s perspective – probably waking up this morning to find she’d gone, almost certainly to the place they’d tried to keep her away from. Hm. “Yeah, ok, I probably deserved that.”

Zappa folds their arms, looking at her with an expression that is trying to be angry but mostly looks _worried,_ and probably more than a little relieved to see her again. She screws up her face.

“Sorry,” she says. “Really, I am. Also, I’m not 100% to blame, since I’m about 90% certain it pulled me in telepathically, which is rather hard to resist, especially in a psychically sensitive race like mine. But –” she cuts herself off, dragging herself back to her apology. “I am sorry.”

Zappa sighs, and uncrosses their arms before taking a step closer and hugging her around the waist. The Doctor flinches for a moment, before making herself relax a little. She pats the alien’s head awkwardly. Zappa mumbles something into her poncho, before looking up and pressing their hand against her forehead. The Doctor can’t help but smile, even as she feels Zappa’s emotions swirling in the back of her mind, and reaches out to touch their own forehead, mirroring the gesture. They stay like that for a moment, before the Doctor pulls back.

“I still need your help, Zappa,” she says, and the alien frowns at her. “I know what that ruin is, down there. And I made it a promise – that I’d fix it. But I need spare parts – I need to look at the things you’ve found in the sand. If I could use them to fix it, then –” she thinks, suddenly, of the creature she’d found in the limbo atrophier. One of Zappa’s people. “Then it won’t be a danger to you anymore. It’ll be safe.”

Zappa looks at her, and then gazes out into the desert for a long moment, clearly considering this. Then, with one more glance at her, they give her a thumbs up. The Doctor’s smile breaks into a grin, optimism bubbling up like a spring. The rational part of her that doesn’t believe she can fix it – that says that TARDIS will _never_ fly again – hums at the edges, threatening. But she pushes it aside.

She’s brilliant. She always has been. And so what if it’s impossible? She regularly does six impossible things before _breakfast,_ after all.

The pair of them head back to the settlement together, immediately heading towards Zappa’s shack and, upon entering, straight to the backroom to the little workshop. Zappa starts riffling through some oddments, before finding a pile of blank, rough paper and a stick of a charcoal-like substance. They push it towards the Doctor, before pointing at the drawings on the wall. The Doctor understands immediately – if she can draw the parts she needs, Zappa can see if they have them.

She gets to it right away, the list of things she’d need already growing in her mind. Her sketches aren’t quite as neat or detailed as Zappa’s, and she keeps smudging it, but they’re accurate enough for Zappa to get the gist of it once they’ve squinted at them for a few seconds (although they do sigh hopelessly at the rather messy scribble that is supposed to represent a transitional element. The Doctor pointedly ignores them). She churns out several pictures quite quickly – a canister of zyton-7, part of the energy distributor circuit, a slightly less scrawled version of the transitional element, various engine parts, a helmic regulator, and various else besides. As the list grows, she can’t help but think of her _own_ TARDIS, still standing out there in the sand. There are a number of parts that she needs to fix _her_ too. Parts that, possibly – _probably –_ she could salvage from the Battle TARDIS if she really wanted to –

_No._

She made a promise.

One she is going to keep.

 _Even if it leaves you stranded here?_ asks her brain, sounding a bit like Graham, or maybe Donna, or maybe both. She frowns, pressing a little harder with the charcoal.

 _When someone needs help,_ she says in response to her own mind, _I never refuse._

It doesn’t argue back with her after that.

Zappa spends most of the time rooting through their stash, occasionally bringing out the parts she’s drawn. Most of them, however, have bits missing at best – at worst is the helmic regulator, which Zappa only gives her half of, and that half is in multiple pieces. There’s a lot missing. For a start, there’s nowhere near enough zyton-7, even though Zappa has managed to accumulate _some,_ but unless she’s willing to empty her _own_ TARDIS’ reserves of the substance, the amount she has isn’t going to cut it. A sense of despair begins to bristle at the back of her mind.

Again, she pushes it aside.

She’ll fix it.

She has to.

She _promised._

Zappa knocks something to the floor with a clatter, and it snaps her out of her thoughts. She watches them for a moment as they look through the contents of a bag they’ve just poured out onto their workbench. Abruptly, she remembers again what she’d found in the limbo atrophier. And then Zappa’s reaction when she’d tried to go herself the previous day. Determined. Extremely so. And clearly very, _very_ scared.

She remembers how she’d thought it strange before. How she’d pegged Zappa as the type who _would_ go and explore enormous ruins standing out in the sand, and had been surprised that they were determined _not_ to go. How she was certain that they’d been before.

“Zappa,” she says, a bad feeling pooling in the pit of her stomach. “Did you go to that ruin before?”

The alien pauses, ears suddenly flattening against their head. They don’t move for a long moment, before giving her a small thumbs up, not looking at her.

The Doctor swallows. “Did…someone go with you? One of your people?”

Zappa doesn’t answer. They suddenly seem very focused on the scrap in front of them. The Doctor’s face creases with concern and sympathy, before she gets up from her stool and coming to crouch in the doorway.

“Zappa…” she says. “I found…what was left of them. I’m sorry.”

Zappa stops what they’re doing and looks at her, tears shining in their eyes. And despite the fact she’s not so fond of _touching_ in this body, she makes the effort to reach out and hold Zappa’s upper arm over their poncho.

She doesn’t really have the words. She’s not really any good at that, in moments like these. But she is _sorry._

She knows how it feels to walk away from something as the only survivor.

She knows how it feels to lose a friend.

She waits for a moment, before letting them go, and…well, she does have quite an important question.

“Was there a body in there?” she asks. “I mean, when you first went in there? Because that place is a ship, a living one, and it’s pilot…was one of my people.”

Zappa seems to think for a moment, and then moves past her, grabbing a canteen before heading towards the front door. They open it and then pause, looking back at her expectantly. The Doctor frowns, before getting up out of her crouch and heading out after them.

She is led just outside the village, along a route that Zappa hasn’t taken her before. It leads past the spring and the succulents to an area of sand that is cast into shade by the small mesa they’ve walked around. There, on the sand, are two piles of rocks lying alongside each other. They’re bordered by an array of desert plants, thriving in the sand that is otherwise barren. At the foot of each pile is a slab, with little runes carved in. The Doctor frowns, vaguely recognising the symbols from where she’d seen them before, on the monument surrounding the time mine.

They are, quite obviously, graves.

Zappa moves over to one in particular, standing over it solemnly and clutching the canteen in their hands. They stay like that for a moment, eyes closed and muttering something, before they carefully unscrew their canteen and begin to pour it gently over the succulents. Then they move over to the other pile, where the Doctor stands, and looks up at her, holding out the canteen to her. She takes it. Holds it in her hands, considering the weight. It must be about half full.

Enough for her to water these plants too.

Zappa says something, before looking towards the second grave, and then back to her. The Doctor nods, something painful blossoming in her chest.

The grave of a timelord.

Timelords had always seen death strangely – an inconvenience, irritating, but ultimately impermanent. Until it was, of course. Everything has it’s time and everything dies, and even regeneration had its limitations. Well. Most of the time, anyway. But when a life _so long_ ends…that had always been a rather big deal. Funerals and graves on Gallifrey had always been rather…extravagant, she thought.

This grave is incredibly humble.

It’s also the first grave of a timelord she has seen in a _very_ long time.

How many timelords died when Gallifrey burned under the Master’s hand? How many were never buried? Will _never_ be buried?

She closes her eyes, bowing her head for a moment. The Peregrine’s memories still swirl in the back of her head, like the traces of a drawing not-quite erased. A life not-quite forgotten. A person she’d desperately hoped would be alive so she wouldn’t be _alone_ anymore – but then, she never gets what she wants, does she? Not in the end. It always comes down to the lives she’s failed to save.

A shuddery sigh escapes her throat, and then she opens her eyes. Zappa is still beside her, but thankfully not watching her. They’re just looking at the grave, and then further – out into the sand, right to where it meets the horizon and then up into the sky.

The Doctor looks too, for a long moment. And then she kneels down and waters the plants at her feet.

After they return to the shack, they head back out into the sand to scavenge for more of the parts they desperately need. They spend several long hours under the baking sun just looking, searching, only stopping once to share some food that Zappa had brought along. But no luck. Most of the parts that they come across are already damaged beyond use, probably already blasted to pieces in the Time War before they came down the plughole to this place. For a moment, she thinks she sees a container of the much-needed zyton-7 half-buried in the sand, but it turns out to be an illusion – a pinkish reflection of the sun on the glass, the container itself only filled with dust.

The feeling of hopelessness begins to take hold in her mind.

Eventually, Zappa makes them turn back, having collected a few items for their own interest, but only finding very little of what they actually _need._ The Doctor racks her brains, thinking through other options because there has to be a way, _surely._ What if she fixed up her TARDIS first? Then she could go wherever she wanted, find spare parts –

There are some parts that can only be found on Gallifrey.

Yes, but maybe she could _make them._ Figure something out, _engineer_ something!

But then she’d have to get back to this planet. She’d have to land somehow, and the TARDIS hadn’t reacted well to that _at all_ the first time. Would she end up stranded here all over again?

Is she going to end up stranded here anyway?

She considers it briefly – staying here for the rest of her lives. She didn’t even know how many lives she _had_ –

– _“How many regenerations did we give you?_ ”  
asks Rassilon,  
old and having lived far too long,  
and the Doctor doesn’t know  
but he doesn’t step back  
from the line he’s drawn in the sand,  
daring the warmongers to come for him –

She blinks, and the settlement is ahead of them. They trudge onwards, miserable and muscles aching by the time they’re walking through the doorway of the shack. The Doctor slumps down onto the bed, her mind still racing.

There has to be a way.

There _has to be._

She thinks briefly of her sonic, left on the console. If only she had it, maybe –

But her sonic wouldn’t fix this. She knows that.

Maybe there are spare zyton-7 reserves onboard?

But why didn’t the Peregrine use them?

The Peregrine _had_ been dying. Probably a bit distracted.

She leans forwards, elbows on her knees as she runs a hand through her hair. Even if she could _fix_ the TARDIS, where would it go? It can’t go back to Gallifrey – and she can’t abandon her own TARDIS. It would just end up alone again – drifting in space without a pilot. Isn’t that just as bad as it is now?

She feels a presence beside her, and looks up to see Zappa standing next to her. Behind them, across the table, are the scattered pieces of parts over the sketches she’d drawn earlier. Reality, which has been waiting in the wings, steps into centre stage in her mind.

She’s not going to be able to fix it.

“I don’t know what to _do,_ ” she mutters. “I made a _promise_ to help it, and I can’t. But it’s so _alone._ How can I go back and tell it that there’s nothing I can do? I can’t just _leave_ it like that!” She puts her head back in her hands. If she goes back and tells it that, it’ll just lock the doors again – it’ll _never_ let her out. At this point, the only thing she’d be able to do for it is to put it out of its misery. Take that time mine from that monument and throw it into its heart. Quick, hopefully.

A mercy killing.

She swallows, _hating_ the thought of it, but knowing it’s the only option.

At least that way, it would have peace. An end to its suffering.

She lifts her head out of her hands, trying to let her new plan settle. It doesn’t, churning like acid in her gut – but she forces it down. Another life she’s failing to save. But that’s the way it always is. And she’s always the one to make the hard decisions – to bear the brunt of it. Because she’s the only one who can bear to take the burden, even when it feels like it’s going to crush her completely.

“Alright,” she says, not looking at Zappa. She can feel their eyes on her, practically feel their concern. “New plan.”

She gets up, crossing over to the table and grabbing one of the sketches. She flips it over, and quickly sketches the time mine on the other side, adding a little drawing of the monuments for good measure. Zappa stands over her shoulder, watching.

“We need a way to get this out without it tearing our timelines apart,” she says, trying to think of how they’d even do that through how much she _hates_ this plan. But she has to. There’s nothing else she can do.

 _Be kind,_ she’d once said to herself. Isn’t this the kindest thing she can do? Let it rest?

Zappa is looking at the sketch, and takes a step back in alarm, putting their thumb down frantically. Their eyes are wide with fear, and a good amount of disbelief.

“Yes, I know, I _know_ it’s bad, but it’s the only choice we’ve got. The ship runs on time, _feeds_ off it, and that thing rips time apart _very_ quickly and _very efficiently._ It’s the only way I can help it. I can’t _fix it_ and it’s _so alone_ and –”

She stops. Zappa isn’t going to get it. No-one will. Why had she even bothered trying to explain herself? She thinks of Graham, Yaz, Ryan – would she have bothered trying to explain it to them? She’s can’t help but feel a sense of relief that they’re not here now to see her like this. She doesn’t have to watch as their illusions shatter. But thinking of them just _hurts_ her even more – their faces awash with concern and pity as she’d dumped them in Sheffield and gone off alone. She shakes her head, pushing herself away from the table. She shouldn’t have even tried explaining it to Zappa – they don’t need to know, only _she_ needs to know. Only she needs to be the one to have blood on her hands. Her hands are slick with it anyway. No-one else needs to live like this.

Not on her watch.

She heads to the door, yanking it open and about to step outside when Zappa grabs the corner of her poncho, making distressed noises. She pulls it out of their grip, frustrated.

“Let me _go!”_ she snaps, furious. Zappa practically drops the fabric in alarm at the sudden shift in her tone. She looks away, hating the look on their face, before striding out into the sand, heading in the direction of the ruin in the early evening light. She hears Zappa call out behind her, confused. She doesn’t turn back.

Collecting the time mine will be tricky, but she’s sure she can figure it out. She just needs a bit of time, and probably her sonic. Which means she needs to get back to the battle TARDIS. When she’s there, she needs to put it to sleep again – this time more permanently. She doesn’t allow herself to pause, to try and lessen the pain of what she’s about to do. She deserves it. She didn’t save them the first time, and she’s too stupid to save them now.

At least, if she can put it to sleep, it won’t be awake when she ends it.

Part of her thinks she could just shut it off – put it to sleep to never wake up. But it’s not final, not _sure_ enough. What if something wakes it up, and it finds she abandoned it too? She won’t do that. That would be even worse than what she’s _about_ to do.

She suddenly registers movement beside her, and she looks down to see Zappa has run to catch up with her. In their hands is a small succulent in a dark pot.

“Go back, Zappa,” she says, her voice tired. “You don’t want to be here.”

_I don’t want you to see me do this._

But Zappa pretends not to listen, and stubbornly walks beside her, plant clutched carefully against their chest.

“ _Go back,”_ she hisses.

But they don’t.

She huffs, giving it up. _Fine._ If they really want to see, they can see. They can be horrified and never look at her again, and then she can spend the rest of her time here fixing her TARDIS and focus on getting away from here and never, ever coming back.

They trek through the canyon and out across the hot sand. The sun is sinking in the sky, but still a reasonable way off from the horizon. If she’s quick, there’s no doubt they can get back before dark. The ruined TARDIS lays before them, growing ever nearer. The closer they get, the more nervous Zappa seems to become, even their stubbornness to stay beginning to falter. The Doctor half-thinks – half-hopes – that they might turn around and leave her after all, out of fear. But whilst they’re clearly afraid, they remain resolute in their resolve, and keep pace with her even though she’s walking quickly without consideration for their smaller legs.

She leads the way through the ribcage of the ruins, under the wind-worn columns and up towards the altar. She moves past it, pausing before the wooden door for a moment, preparing herself. Zappa waits beside her, clutching their pot tightly with one hand, the other fisted into the corner of the Doctor’s poncho. She sighs, closing her eyes. Hating herself. Hating the universe, that there’s no other way and that this is how the chips have fallen. This is how the timelines have been weaved, for this TARDIS and herself to come to this moment, out here in the sand and the nothingness.

The wind rustles her hair. It does not bear judgement.

It has, after all, always been her witness.

It has seen her do so much worse than this.

But that doesn’t make this any easier.

She opens her eyes, before pushing against the door. It swings open expectantly under her hands, and there’s a blue glow from the TARDIS. It practically sings at her.

_You’re back! You’re back._

She stares for a moment, before making to step over the threshold and into the console room. Only a tug holds her back, and she looks down to see Zappa, _terrified,_ is stopping her from going inside.

“It won’t hurt me. I’m a timelord,” she says. She doesn’t mention that while Zappa is _with_ her, it also won’t hurt them – a friend of a timelord. But she wants them to _go._ And so she pulls herself out of their grip and steps inside, immediately striding towards the console.

The ship whorps, flitting at the edges of her mind. She wishes she could smile at it, but she can’t, instead just reaching over to disable the limbo atrophier, before moving around to take her sonic. She holds it tightly in her hand for a moment, before slipping it back into her pocket and resting her other hand on the edge of the console. The TARDIS must sense some of her emotions, because a sense of confusion grows from the place where it brushes against her thoughts. She gives it a pat – a pathetic attempt to be reassuring.

“I made you a promise,” she says through her closing throat, “that I’d help you. That I’d make things better for you.”

And that’s what she’s going to do. _It is._ This is the only way. She’s accepted it.

The TARDIS hums, confusion growing to nervousness. It trusts her – but only just.

“I need to shut you down to do repairs,” she tells it. “Just for a while. Just so it won’t hurt you.”

_Just so you’re not awake when I kill you._

The TARDIS doesn’t react for a long moment, clearly considering. Then, without warning, it bleeps in a tone she isn’t expecting, blue lighting suddenly shifting to a warm green. She frowns, looking up, before turning to look at the entrance.

Zappa has not entered the console room, still standing stubbornly outside. But the small succulent they’d brought with them has been placed on the floor just within the doorway. Like an offering – an olive branch?

Or like flowers for a grave.

Zappa themself seems surprised at the reaction from the ship, glancing around at the change in the lights. They still look scared, but it doesn’t quite drown out the indelible curiosity that always lingers at the edges of their eyes. They say something, muttering under their breath, and the ship whorps in response. Zappa blinks, a little taken aback, like they’re not sure if the sound was a coincidence or not. 

The Doctor stares at them for a moment, and then back to the console.

An idea sparks, tentative, optimistic – almost catching.

Maybe…

_Maybe…_

She steps away from the console, moving back towards Zappa. She crouches in front of them, very gently picking up the pot and looking at the plant for a moment, before her gaze flicks back to its nervous owner.

“I turned off the limbo atrophier – the thing that hurt your friend before,” she tells them. “You can come in. It’s safe.”

She rises out of her crouch, stepping aside to invite Zappa inside. They hesitate for a moment, squinting in trepidation, before fisting their hands nervously into the end of their poncho sleeves and moving inside. The TARDIS hums with intrigue, and at the edge is a sense of sadness. Regret. Like it recognises Zappa. Knows what it did.

“It was scared, before. It was _scared_ and _sick_ and it had been so alone for so long,” she explains, before looking up at the ceiling. It’s brightening, like daylight spilling through the upper windows of a cathedral. She glances down at the plant in her hands, before walking up to the steps around the console. She stops before the top one, putting the plant down there and stepping back down again. The lights in the ceiling brighten further just overhead, shining directly on the plant. Hope catches on the kindling in her mind, burning through the despair that had overwhelmed her.

“ _Yes,_ ” she murmurs, looking back at Zappa, “Yes! There’s _another way!”_

Zappa just cocks their head, clearly bewildered, as the Doctor runs up to them and grabs their shoulders in excitement.

“It’s been alone! That’s the problem! It’s so alone and it couldn’t get back home – but now…” she pauses, looking back towards the central column and addressing the ship itself. “There is no home to go back to. Gallifrey’s gone. Destroyed. Even if could I fix you, you’d be alone. I can’t stay with you and…I can’t stay here.”

The TARDIS lets out a mournful tone, the room shuddering with it. Zappa flinches, afraid, but the Doctor lets go of them and kneels down, a hand pressed against the flooring.

“I know,” she says, “I’m sorry. But _it’s ok,_ because…you don’t need to be alone here.” She looks up, to Zappa. “What do you think? It won’t hurt you, or any of your people anymore. It knows you’re a friend. And it could keep you safe.” She thinks of the settlement, made up of patched-together shacks. “If there’s a sandstorm – or if the Neverweres come that far out and attack you – you could take refuge in here. The TARDIS would keep you safe – all of you. And there’s _food_ in here too – this place is bigger than you could _ever_ imagine, Zappa, you’d _love_ it! There’s so much to explore! So much to learn – there’s so much technology in here! Although,” she scrunches up her face, “might want to be careful what you touch.”

Zappa is staring at her, clearly a little unsure.

“Come on,” she says, trying not to feel desperate. “I know it scared you…it hurt you. But it can help you now. And you can help it be better. So it doesn’t hurt anyone else again. It doesn’t even have to be _you,_ just – someone! Just so it’s not alone out here.”

Zappa looks at her, and then past her, to their plant which is bathed in the artificial sunlight. Their ears are tucked back against their head, still nervous, but she can feel their burning curiosity. They don’t _want_ to be afraid.

“Let me introduce you,” she says, her tone soft, holding out her hand. There’s a pause, a moment when she’s not sure what Zappa will do. Then they lift up their arm and place their hand in hers, before looking up at her expectantly. She grins, the despair evaporating completely and hope blooming in its place. She leads the way, pulling Zappa up the steps and around the console. Zappa’s just able to peak over it and reach the various dials, but they don’t actually touch anything, acting very cautiously. The Doctor pats the edge affectionately, and the TARDIS bleeps at her, showing a scattering of Gallifreyan on the view screen. Zappa’s curiosity immediately piques, and the Doctor watches as they stand on tiptoes to get a better look.

“That’s my language! But it won’t translate for you because – _oh!”_ A sudden realisation hits her. “You’ve been in this TARDIS before! The translation circuit must have been automatically activated – that’s why you’re able to understand me!”

Zappa makes a noise that sounds distinctly impressed, and immediately looks back at the screen, their fear gradually dissipating like dust blown away by the wind. They reach out to put their hand on the console, and the ship hums in response, the light of the column growing brighter for a moment.

“It’s semi-sentient and telepathic,” she explains, before screwing up her face a little. “Although I’m not sure your species are telepathic, but you can still get a sense of what it’s trying to say.” If it got in their head already with the translation circuit, she thinks there’s a chance of it. It won’t be as vibrant as the way _she_ communicates with TARDISes, especially her own. But her companions have always been able to get something from the ship, even though humans aren’t exactly the most psychic beings in the whole universe.

She looks back at Zappa, who is now cautiously brushing their hands over levers, but not pulling anything. The Doctor gives a hum. “I’d be careful touching anything on the console though. There’s a lot damaged, a lot that could go wrong.” She looks back again, towards the column, thinking about how only minutes ago she’d been prepared to do something awful. To take away its agency, its soul. It’s only hope. She’d been so caught up in her despair that she hadn’t been able to see it. The hope, blossoming like a flower in the desert.

“It’s been here for a very long time,” she explains to Zappa, so they can understand. “And it crashed here – from the place where all the other parts you find out there in the desert come from. But because of the temporal anomalies here – the things that your people build those markers around – it got…sick. Sick, but also mourning…and lonely. It can’t leave here…and I can’t stay.” She turns to Zappa. “But you can. You and your people – and the people who come after you. You can make sure it’s _never_ lonely again. And it can keep you safe. Right?” She directs the question at the ship, and it whorps in response – eager, and filled with warmth. Hope.

Zappa says something. As always, she’s not sure what it means, but she gets the feeling it’s an agreement. Or a greeting, maybe?

They reach out, putting their hand as far up the console as they can reach. The Doctor gets the distinct sense that this is as close as Zappa can get to putting their hand on the ship’s forehead.

 _Hello,_ they seem to say.

The ship hums in reply. _Hello._

Zappa stays like that for a moment. Then they turn back to the Doctor, giving her a thumbs up. The Doctor just grins, pure relief and joy crashing through her.

“ _Thank you,”_ she murmurs. Zappa just looks at her, the emotion in their eyes unreadable. She never really had been good at expressions. Maybe they don’t quite understand why she’s thanking them, but she won’t explain. She stays silent, looking down at the succulent on the stairs. The light pools around it, shimmering almost.

Not everything can be saved. Not always.

But sometimes…just sometimes, when the universe throws its dice or decides, on a whim, to be kind…

Sometimes, something can.

The next few days are filled with much the same that they had been before – sand, TARDIS repairs, and more sand. She makes the trek back to her own ship with spare parts in hand, tinkering and soldering things back together until well after the sun has sunk below the horizon. She works on the battle TARDIS too – there’s no need to fix it to fly anymore, but the damage is still dangerous if Zappa and their people are going to use it. So, she sorts things out, patching up the holes in the engines and tears in the seams, dealing with the worst and most risky issues. Zappa often keeps her company when she works, and when they’re not, they’re gradually bringing more of their plants into the console room. The light in the ceiling accommodates, matching the brightness of the sky outside without the discomfort of the incessant heat.

The rest of Zappa’s people are a lot more cautious towards the ship, clearly remembering what had happened last time someone had investigated the ruin. But, slowly, a few of them begin to come around. Zappa’s housemate is one of them, who had been dragged down by their shorter friend and had stood stubbornly well outside the door to the console room for at least an hour. By the next day, they’re helping Zappa arrange the pots of succulents around the space, and seem quite enamoured with the way the ship adjusts the lighting based on where they place the plants – and the way it wheezes happily when they arrange them in a particular way.

Within a few more days, the TARDIS seems to realise that Zappa and the others really _are_ going to look after it in the long run and starts helping the Doctor in her quest to fix her own ship. There are parts that are mostly functional but no longer of use to it which it directs her to, corridors shifting to take her to the things she needs. It’s not threatening anymore – just helpful. But things aren’t completely ok with it, she can tell. Years upon years of loneliness and grief and temporal sickness doesn’t just go away overnight. There are moments, when she’s alone in the depths of the engines, when she can feel its thoughts grow sombre. Homesick for a place that it can never go back to. But she understands how that feels all too well these days, and so she pauses in her relentless work to rest her hand on the walls.

“ _It’s ok,_ ” she whispers to it more than once. “ _We make our own homes, you and I.”_

She can’t fix the temporal sickness, she realises. Using the TARDIS scanners, she’d been able to create a much more complete understanding of the nature of the planet. It seems to be at a weak point in the dimensional fabric of this reality – a convergence between multiple universes, overlapping and overwriting each other. She’s heard of places like this before, where the collision points between dimensional branes cause the timelines – or rather, time _itself_ – to twist and distort. She supposes it makes sense that the Gates of Elysium would lead to a place like this. It explains Zappa’s people, too – literally quantum entangled, their own language in a constant state of flux. They’re a melting pot creation of dimensional fluctuations, that must have just appeared when the universes collided in just the right way. They’re stable though, she realises. Stable enough to stay here for a long, long time.

And so the anomalies are a part of the planet’s nature that she simply can’t change. Not even the timelords could untangle universes from each other. But she _can_ lessen the TARDIS’s pain, disconnecting the time engines from their couplings and minimising the connection to the Web of Time. She’d never be able to cut it off completely – not without making things even worse – but at least this way the ship won’t be pulled in multiple directions at once, won’t be twisted between the temporal tears and the fabric of time itself.

With the help of the extra parts, the repairs on her own TARDIS are much faster. Her ship is a little jealous – the Doctor can feel it, bolder and much more familiar than the telepathic circuits of the battle TARDIS, and she can’t help but roll her eyes.

“Come on, old girl,” she teases. “You know you’re the only one for me.”

The TARDIS whorps in reply, and even has the grace to act a little sheepish – after all, she’d been affected by the influence of the other TARDIS as much as the Doctor had. It turned out the other ship’s signal had gotten her all scrambled, meaning she refused to take off _at all_ in case the Doctor tried to leave the planet, even though the Doctor had actually been _trying_ to get closer to the other TARDIS. It’s probably a good thing she wasn’t successful. Who knows what would have happened if the other TARDIS had gotten her ship fully under its influence?

“Two of you against poor old me,” she complains at the hypothetical timeline where that _did_ happen. “That wouldn’t have been fair at all.”

Her TARDIS makes a strange noise that is most certainly the Doctor being _laughed at._

“Shut up,” she says fondly, swatting at the console. All she gets in response in more laughing, and a series of images pushed gently into her mind. The sounds of all the people she’s loved and brought into the TARDIS, the flashes of their smiles. She closes her eyes for a long moment, holding the memories close to her chest. Grateful. Scared to let them go.

She’d thought, for a while, she thinks, that she’d been alone so long. Like the battle TARDIS, left standing even as the years and the wind keep rolling by, perpetual.

But she’s not alone. She’s never been alone.

Even when they’re not by her side anymore, she carries them with her.

She opens her eyes, looking up at where the crystal pillars meet above her; where the hexagonal ceiling glows a gentle blue behind the orange. There’s a hum from the ship, which reverberates in her chest.

Of course. The one friend who has never left her side. The one who has been with her since the start.

She smiles. “Where would I be without you, old girl?”

The TARDIS bleeps, amused, and the Doctor gets a sense of the reply – _in a lot more trouble, probably._

The Doctor laughs, something beautiful and vibrant filling her chest. She revels in it.

“Come on, now,” she says. “We both know the truth. You get me into half the trouble in the first place.”

The ship hums in agreement, almost proud of the fact. The Doctor smiles again, before brushing her hand against the console, pausing, saving this moment in her mind. A brief second where everything feels like maybe it’ll all be alright in the end.

“Alright,” she says. “I think it’s time.”

The repairs are finished, and so whilst the TARDIS isn’t best pleased at the idea of hopping around a planet with more temporal anomalies than you could shake a stick at, the Doctor manages to persuade her to land on the stretch of sand just across from the battle TARDIS. The doors swing open with a creak and the Doctor steps out into the early evening light. The sky is blue, but turning pinkish, about to burn into a brilliant sunset, and she marvels at it for a moment before heading towards the ruin. It’s not long before she reaches it, and immediately she notices that the plants are no longer contained to just the inside of the ship. Pots upon pots of succulents and desert plants are arranged around the ruined nave, balanced on any part of the white stone that isn’t too tall to be reached. The Doctor reaches out to touch one, curious, only to prick her hand on the spines. She yelps, and ends up sucking her finger for the rest of the way up to the doors of the console room. Luckily, she opens them to find there is not many around to judge her – just Zappa and two others, both even smaller than her friend. They look vaguely familiar, and so she examines them for a moment before it hits her. Back when she’d first woken up in Zappa’s shack – the two she’d thought to be children who’d poked at her before running off. She can’t help but smile, amused, as Zappa clearly tries to wrangle them into _not_ pressing every button on the console. It doesn’t really matter if they fail, however – the Doctor has disabled the functions that would actually cause a problem, and the ship itself is intelligent enough to realise that these small hands aren’t actually _intending_ to activate the zig-zag plotter or the plasma shields.

The Doctor walks over, but stays at the base of the steps, not going up to the console. The trio clearly sense her movement, as they suddenly stop what they’re doing and turn to look at her. The smaller two rush over to her immediately, stopping right in front of her and staring up at her face.

“Hi,” she grins. The pair of them chirrup something back – they can understand her now too, thanks to the translation circuits. She finds herself wishing for the billionth time that it would work both ways – but then, she supposes it doesn’t matter all that much now. Not since her TARDIS is back in working order.

She looks up to watch as Zappa packs their things into their bag and hurries down the steps to join them. They give her a questioning look, and the Doctor hears the unspoken question.

_Here to fix more things?_

But no. They both know she finished working on this TARDIS already.

“I’ve fixed my ship,” she explains. “Everything all sorted. _Well,_ I say everything. The helmic regulator’s always been a bit on the dodgy side and the chameleon circuit has never worked, but I don’t have the heart to fix them.” She clears her throat, reining her mouth in from a good ramble. “But that means I should be getting back. Back to my friends.”

Zappa’s ears droop, and the TARDIS around her whorps sadly – but not possessively, she notes. This time, the ship will let her leave. Even if it desperately wants her to stay.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I would stay longer, but…”

Technically, she can stay as long as she like. Time travel and all of that. But she’s been avoiding everything, treating Graham, Yaz and Ryan terribly. Trying to hide things from them. And while there’s things she doesn’t want them to know, things she _can’t_ let them see…

“I keep running away from them. My family. I keep hiding.” She looks up, at the pinkish glow of the ceiling. “It’s time I went back them.”

The TARDIS hums, not understanding completely but accepting the answer. Zappa just reaches out and pats her elbow, not really able to hug her with two children in their way – one of whom jumps to catch their arm. The Doctor smiles.

“You lot heading back now?” she asks as Zappa tries to wrestle their arm back, without success. They manage to give a thumbs-up with their spare arm, which is quickly captured by the other child. They sigh, looking resigned, and then begin to walk away. The younger ones end up dragged behind them for a few paces before they decide that running ahead is far more exciting and dash out of the door ahead of them.

They end up stopping by her TARDIS for a few moments as the kids attempt to climb it – the Doctor and Zappa have to pull them off before the ship gets _too_ irritated – and then start heading back towards the pass in the canyon. It’s not long then before they arrive at the outskirts of the village, the sky above them just beginning to really ignite with dusk. The two kids run off, further into the bustling settlement, whilst Zappa leads the Doctor into the shack. They seem… _excited_ by something, given the way their ears have pricked up, although she’s never exactly been good at reading emotions. But the theory is confirmed when Zappa leads her to sit down on the bed, their hand brushing against hers for a moment and the emotions bleeding through the contact. She frowns, watching, as they scurry off into the back room.

Within seconds, they’re back, this time carrying a bundle wrapped up in a dark fabric that she can’t quite figure out. Zappa places it on the table, before moving over to the Doctor and pulling at their poncho, indicating for her to take hers off. Her frown only deepens, but she does it, yanking the fabric over her head. She supposes, if she’s leaving, they probably want it back. Maybe they don’t have many spare. But…well, she doesn’t have her coat anymore. And it really is a very nice poncho.

More than that. It’s something to remember this place by, since she can’t imagine getting the TARDIS to land here again is going to be easy.

She holds out the poncho to Zappa, who lays it down on the bed beside her before going back to the bundle and beginning to unwrap it. First comes out a familiar azure fabric – her trousers, which Zappa offers to her, now complete with little brown patches on the knees. She can’t help but smile.

“Thanks! You didn’t need to,” she says, and Zappa gives a sort of strange-but-familiar motion that the Doctor assumes is akin to a shrug. She considers it for a moment, realising that it probably hadn’t been Zappa that had fixed them, but rather their housemate. Either way, she’s grateful, and takes them, holding them close to her chest.

But the bundle isn’t empty yet, and Zappa turns to unwrap it further. The Doctor catches a glimpse of sky-blue material, and a gasp escapes her throat. She can’t help but stand up and join Zappa’s side, watching in wonder as they reveal –

“My _coat,_ ” she breathes. Zappa steps aside, and she moves forwards to pick it up, examining it. It’s a little worse for wear – torn here and there, still covered in sand in places. But it’s _hers,_ and she has it, along with all the things that had been in her pockets.

She can’t help but be astounded. “How did you even get it _back?_ The last I saw of it, a bunch of Neverweres had it!”

In response, Zappa just leads her over to the door, opening it to look out. They scan the others who are bustling around, before pointing to a particular person. They are a little taller than Zappa, she thinks, but much broader. She frowns looking back at Zappa.

“They got it?”

Zappa gives her a bemused thumbs up.

“… _how?_ ”

Zappa does the strange almost-shrug again. The Doctor looks back to the one who they’d pointed out, watching as they start talking animatedly to the two kids they’d been with earlier. They seem to be telling them a dramatic story that definitely involves some wrestling.

Hm.

“I think,” she says, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, “it’s best not to ask.”

Zappa makes a noise that the Doctor thinks is a laugh, before heading back inside.

Other than her trousers and her coat, there isn’t much left for her to clear up, and so she and Zappa head back out towards the two TARDISes. Sunset is in full swing now, the sun beginning to dip below the horizon. Night will soon be chasing at their heels – but for now there’s still time. Time to say goodbye.

They stop just beside her TARDIS, lingering for a moment, looking towards the ruined cathedral that isn’t a cathedral at all, bathed red and orange in the light. For a while, neither of them say anything. The Doctor can’t help but feel a sense of dread, knowing what’s coming. Endings. She _hates_ endings – she’s frankly terrible at them, always has been and always will. But she knows Zappa isn’t about to let her slink off without at least something – wouldn’t forgive her if she did. And since she knows that the chances of her being able to come back to this planet are so low, she can’t bear to let it end badly. It wouldn’t be _kind –_ not to this friend, who has helped her so much whilst she’s been lost in the sand.

After a few minutes, Zappa turns, not trying to say anything, just opening their arms to offer a hug. The Doctor hesitates for a moment, but since she’s able to initiate the contact, it’s fine, and so she kneels down and pulls them in her arms. They return the hug, their hands balling into her coat, and she rests her head on their shoulder, glancing up towards the sky.

She should say something – loose words flitter at the edges of her mind but nothing meaningful settles on her tongue. She feels a bit bad about that. Did she used to be better at this? She’s not sure. But maybe it doesn’t really matter in the end. Their friendship, after all, has rather transcended words. Perhaps it’s fitting this way. To end with a gesture, not a stilted monologue that Zappa wouldn’t even be able to reply to.

After a moment, the contact begins to get uncomfortable, and so she pulls back. Zappa lets her, reaching out while she’s still knelt down to press their palm gently against her forehead. The Doctor’s face creases with a smile, and she holds her own hand over Zappa’s eyes. The emotions swirl between them, vibrant. Sharp and yet gentle, in the way goodbyes sometimes are.

“Have a good life,” she says, memories bubbling up as they always do in this place.

_– “Have a fantastic life,” he says  
into the holographic recorder,  
trying not to think of her face –_

She looks at Zappa, saving the image of them into her mind. Then she lowers her hand and pushes herself back up onto her feet. Zappa cocks their head at her for moment, before giving her a thumbs up. The Doctor returns it with one of her own, and a wave. Zappa mirrors the gesture, perhaps a little bewildered at it, before turning to walk back across the sand towards their home. After a few paces, they turn to look back at her, like they’re also bottling up this moment for safe-keeping. Then they turn again, striding onwards across the sand, their poncho flapping gently in the wind.

The Doctor waits until they’re just a spec beside the canyon – until the sun has completely dropped beneath the horizon – before she turns, looking towards the ruin.

There is one more thing she needs to say goodbye to.

The console room of the battle TARDIS lights up as she pushes the door open, and she’s greeted with a gentle hum. She moves over towards the central column, standing in front of the view screen. There are a few things running – one final diagnostic, which seems to be showing everything is a good as she can make it, as well as some kind of frequency monitor. She squints at it for a moment, before she realises what it is – the two TARDISes, parked so close and now more clear-minded, are talking to each other. She can’t help but be amused.

“Stop nattering, you two,” she says good-naturedly. “We’ve gotta head off now.”

There’s an indignant bleep and a wheeze from the ship around her, and she rolls her eyes.

“I _know_ I can ramble for the universe,” she says, folding her arms. She tilts her head back, gazing at the ceiling above her. “In fact, I _have_ done it. Lots of times. But you can tell _my_ TARDIS it’s rather rude of her to spill stories about me behind my back.”

The sound this TARDIS makes is different to when _her_ TARDIS laughs at her, but still undeniable. She sighs, but can’t keep the smile off her face.

“Alright,” she says, her voice low. “I really should be getting a shift on.”

The ship around her hums, sombre. She closes her eyes and lets a long breath escape from her lips.

“Look after them all for me,” she tells it, the words coming so much easier than they did for Zappa. But then, she supposes she’s used to pouring her heart out to TARDISes. “And stay strong. You can heal from everything that happened. You –” she hesitates for a moment, and then opens her eyes, spotting a small succulent that someone has placed carefully on the top of the console. “You can grow again.”

The ships whorps in agreement – in gratitude. Her smile twitches slightly, but she manages to maintain it.

“Don’t thank me,” she murmurs. _I almost did something so awful to you._

It’s telepathic circuits brush against her mind – the whale under the water. The whale, drifting through the stars. She remembers another whale, in another time – Amy, looking at her with red-rimmed eyes and reminding her there was another way.

There is always another way, as long as you look hard enough for it. As long as you don’t give up.

She pats the console, glancing up at the column one last time.

“I won’t be able to come back,” she tells it. “You know that. What those temporal anomalies out there feel like.”

The ship hums, regretful, but understanding. Gently, the door creaks open, and she glances at it. She recognises the gesture for what it is. It’s acceptance. It’s letting go.

Her smile is sad, but genuine.

“Thank you,” she says, before she puts her hands in her pocket and walks down the steps, past the plants, and out into the evening air. Behind her, she hears one last, quiet whorp from the ship, and then the click of the door closing. 

As she walks over to her TARDIS, she looks up. Night is rolling in fast, and the first of the stars are glinting in the deepening blue. Another sky comes to mind, burning orange – a memory she’s replayed so many times now it should be patchy and distorted with static. But it’s just as clear as ever. The stars. The red grass. Koschei, before everything.

She pauses in front of her ship briefly, resting her hand against the door handle and relishing in the achingly familiar hum. Then she pushes it open, stepping into what feels like a warm, psychic embrace.

She doesn’t say anything as she moves over to the console, considering the various instruments. Everything looks in working order. And she could break something, she supposes – but she’s not going to. No point in lingering. No point in stalling.

She clicks her fingers, and the door swings shut, the eternal sound of the desert breeze cutting off with the creak of wood. Her fingers find the dials, setting coordinates and adjusting the zig-zag plotter for one hour after she left Sheffield, before she rests her hand on the lever. Ready and waiting. She breathes in, and out, before closing her eyes. Images flow behind them.

– the burnt orange sky,  
framed by red grass,  
Koschei lying next to him,  
flashing him a grin  
and he returns it –  
  
– the clink of mugs in Yaz’s kitchen,  
the wheeze of the TARDIS engines,  
the view from Graham’s window  
where she can see the drooping begonias  
blowing in the wind,  
the looks on their faces when she  
shows them something new,  
something _wonderful,  
_ their smiles  
their laughs  
their _humanity –  
  
_

She smiles, opening her eyes. The TARDIS hums around her.

“Alright,” she says. “Time to go home.”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yaz, Ryan and Graham, when the Doctor comes back about an hour later: why are you so SUNBURNT?
> 
> BUT AHH THAT'S IT!! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING WOW!! Honestly, I'm so stoked that people have enjoyed this fic - for those who don't know, this is the first fanfic I've actually completed in eight years, so it's something I'm really really proud of. The fact that people have actually sat down to read this nonsense (and left the most AMAZING comments) has just been amazing....so THANK YOU SO MUCH!! 
> 
> I hope the ending was satisfying! Let me know what you thought! I tried to wrap up all the plot threads, but if there's anything you think I missed or anything you're just curious to know more about, please ask - either in the comments or over on my [tumblr](https://picnokinesis.tumblr.com/)! I have many thoughts and I do love a good ramble.
> 
> I also drew [a little something](https://picnokinesis.tumblr.com/post/618675134401839104/just-a-quick-little-watercolour-painting-to) from the ending as a celebration for posting the last chapter
> 
> (If you're wondering if I'll write anything else - I'm currently working on a rather ambitious Doctor Who au where the Doctor is an investigative journalist and the TARDIS is an old VW campervan...so if that tickles your pickles, keep your eyes peeled, hopefully I'll actually post it one day)
> 
> I LOVE YOU ALL THANK YOU SO MUCH AUGH


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